YouTube: I Fought Off Attackers With a Stick (Honest AMA on Robberies, Money & Bicycle Helmets)

VIDEO DESCRIPTION:

Welcome to a VERY long Ask Me Anything video. I’m currently in the middle of my cycling journey around Malaysia, and you sent in 25 questions about everything. No topic was off limits.

In this massive AMA, I cover:

🚨 ROBBERIES & DANGER

– The machete attack on a cyclist in Africa
– Getting pickpocketed by kids in Ethiopia
– The time I fought off a group of men with a heavy wooden stick (and kept it as a trophy)
– Why Peru in the 90s was a non-stop crime spree

🚲 MY BICYCLE “ROCKY”

– Why I’m still riding a 27-year-old bike
– Would I ever get a new one? (And why a $3,000 touring bike doesn’t make sense)
– The truth about breakdowns, chains, and drivetrain maintenance

💰 MONEY & YOUTUBE

– How much I actually spend per day (spoiler: it’s the hotels)
– Does YouTube income cover it? (No. It costs me money to make these videos.)
– Why I’m living off savings from Taiwan and gifts from Planet Doug subscribers
– The reality of being a small YouTuber vs. relying on brand deals

🪖 THE HELMET DEBATE (This gets spicy)

– Why there’s no helmet on my head while touring
– My logical (and possibly controversial) arguments about safety culture
– Why you should wear a helmet in your bathroom

🌏 TRAVEL PHILOSOPHY

– Was I always meant to be a long-term traveler? (No. I just stumbled into it.)
– Why visas have dictated my entire life
– Would I go back to a 9-to-5 job in Canada?
– Thoughts on cycling in India, Pakistan, Brazil, and going back to Taiwan

🍌 HEALTH & DIET

– Sarcopenia, muscle loss at 62, and why I never think about food
– The last time I saw a doctor (I was 18)
– Why I eat almost no fruit (but plenty of pisang goreng)

🎬 PERSONAL LIFE

– Do I have a private life outside YouTube? (No. This is it.)
– The last time I went to a movie theater (and why I’d rather watch on my phone)

And so much more. I talk about Kota Bharu, Singapore, train options I never considered, and the future of Planet Doug.

If you make it to the end of this ridiculously long video, you have my respect.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Good morning and welcome to the Planet Doug Ask Me Anything video for March 2026. I believe I have 25 questions to answer. Some of them overlap a little bit, but instead of grouping them, I’m just going to answer them one by one in the order that they were submitted. Starting with all the questions that were submitted on Patreon and then going to the YouTube post. Those are the two places where people submitted questions to me. So I’m going to go through them one by one and if there is an overlap, I will just sort of refer back to the previous question or perhaps expand on what I said a little bit if two or three people ask about the same topic. So yeah, I have all of the questions queued up on my tablet here and I will read each question and I will try to read the name or the YouTube identifier of the person who asked the question if it’s something that I think I might know how to pronounce at least approximately. We’ll see how that goes.

So starting with number one from Farooq. Farooq writes, “Hi Doug, thanks for the opportunity to ask questions. Have you been robbed or mugged in any country or did you feel too unsafe anywhere on your travels? By the way, I’m enjoying videos of your bicycle trip. Stay strong.” So, in fact, two years ago, three, I don’t know, a number of years ago, I actually recorded and posted, maybe even a series of videos about robberies, like my entire life experience, with robberies and theft in various countries. And, if I can track them down, I’ll post screenshots of them here and put links in the video description. You can find those videos. But basically, I’ve been relatively lucky compared to other people that I’ve followed over the years. I’ve followed people who are traveling by bicycle. There was one guy I remember cycling through Africa and he was attacked by men with machetes when he was starting. He was in North Africa somewhere coming down from Europe and then he was out filming and had his cameras with him things. I think he was just taking pictures and he was robbed by men with machetes and they actually slashed at him and he ended up in the hospital with sliced tendons and things like that. Later in his African trip, he was staying in a low-budget hotel somewhere and he went to take a shower, came back and his room had been cleaned out. Everything was gone. He was traveling with laptops and cameras, all his gear, just his room is empty. Somehow that happened. And I remember some other cyclists who they went into a hotel. There was two of them together, like a couple, and then they rode their bicycles into the hotel courtyard, I think, and then they went up to look at one of the rooms, says, “Oh, would you like to see your room?” Okay. And they think they’re in the courtyard. They’re safe. So they left both of their bicycles in the courtyard and then went up to look at the room. When they came down, one of the bicycles fully loaded with all its bags had vanished. It was just gone. Somebody had jumped on it and ridden away. And then I’ve heard stories other people, a guy I remember in Turkey, his bike and all his gear also stolen, gone. Yeah, another YouTubers, they came back to their hotel. I think they were in Ecuador and their laptop and all their cameras and electronic gear, all of it was gone from their hotel room. So, I’ve heard a lot of horror stories. Luckily, knock on wood, that has never happened to me. But going over my history briefly, I remember I was pickpocketed in Ethiopia one time. A bunch of children just surrounded me on my bicycle and they just started kicking me and grabbing the bike and shaking it, screaming and yelling. It was just like a really weird scene. And then almost as if on cue they ran. So it was like a big crowd of kids, total chaos, and then they disappeared and I was like, “What the heck was that all about?” And then later on I went into this little cafe to buy a drink and I was like, “Oh my wallet.” So all of that was a distraction while one of the kids lifted my wallet. But luckily the night before I had cleaned out my wallet. I had just arrived in Ethiopia and then I took the time the night before to switch from Canada wallet to traveling wallet. So, I removed all my ID, credit card, bank cards, money, everything I took out of my wallet and I only had enough money for the day, which is the normal traveling wallet that you should have if you carry a wallet at all. And the kids took that wallet. So, all I lost was the money for that day. Everything else in my life, I mean, I had one bicycle stolen, but that was not while I was traveling. It was a bike I had used for traveling, but the trip was over and then it was stolen in Montreal in Canada. So, that happened to me. And in Vietnam, this was way back in the ’90s. I think Vietnam today has a reputation of being very, very safe. But I went to Vietnam in the ’90s, and it was a very different experience back then. And it felt like my entire time in Vietnam was an assault on my possessions. People were just trying to steal everything all the time. That’s what it felt like. And I remember all these stories I heard from other backpackers as well where they had these, this was back in the days when we still had like backpacker dedicated hotels and hostels, very low budget with thin walls, screens and wind. I mean, just really weird rooms. And then people in the hotels had cut holes in the screens because there were screens leading from the room out to the hallway, things like that. And then they cut holes in them and they put fishing rods through the screen. And then they would try to hook things off the tables and the beds and then pull them up and steal whatever they could that way. It was just non-stop. And I took a bus one time in Vietnam and I had a backpack. I wasn’t cycling and I just handed over my backpack to the guys at the bus station and I think they loaded it onto the roof and being a dummy and I suppose being inexperienced back in those days I didn’t have a lock on my backpack. So when I got to my hotel opened my backpack everything of value there wasn’t much but everything of some value was gone. So during the bus ride, somebody was up on the roof of the bus, just opened up my backpack and just took out my flashlight, razor blades, like anything of value, anything that looked like it could be sold or used, you just took everything. So my backpack was emptied. Luckily, I didn’t have cameras. I wasn’t a YouTuber back then. Nobody was traveling with smartphones and hard drives and memory cards. None of that existed yet. So there was very little in my backpack other than basically a flashlight I think was the most valuable thing that was stolen. And then when I was in Ethiopia, I mentioned the kids pickpocketed me. But out in the countryside, I did run into attempted theft. Pretty serious attempts to be honest. By that point, I think I was pretty used to how rough Ethiopia was. Again, this was back in the late 90s when I went to Ethiopia, very different country back then. And then I was cycling in the countryside and then going down some very rough, unpaved roads, village to village. And one time there was a group of men just gathered on the road ahead of me. And all of them were holding what they called dula. And these were like heavy sticks, like sticks made out of this special tree that had like dense, thick, heavy wood. And they all carried, all the farmers carried these dulas because they use them to drive their animals and as walking sticks. So all these men surrounded me and they all had dulas and they basically attacked me and they were going to rob me of everything. And I went full Hulk on them. Ethiopia was a very rough country in those days. It may still be. I mean, Ethiopia has a reputation for children throwing rocks at you. And when I was there, I was hit with rocks constantly. Kids throwing rocks at me, trying to jam sticks into my spokes to break the wheel and send me falling. Going up hills, steep mountains, like climbing. The kids would grab hold of my bike and hold me back so I couldn’t go up. Anything out in the open, people would just grab and try to steal. I had people come into my rooms, like I would stay in these very low-budget hotels, $1 a night, and there’s no locks on the doors, so just basically little spaces that were enclosed, had kind of a bed in them, very rough living. And I would go in there, and I’m in my room unpacking from the day, and then the door would open, and people would just come in and wander around the room and just try to take things. So I was kind of accustomed to it at the time. So I didn’t think that much of the men trying to rob me. It just seemed normal for Ethiopia at that time. But I was so stressed out internally, I guess, that I had had enough. And the first man who came at me, I grabbed his dula, ripped it out of his hands, and then I just attacked all the men with a dula. And I was screaming at them and shouting at them and I just beat them all off and they ran. And I remember the funny note of that story was the man who lost the dula to me, he wanted it back. He was standing there. I defeated them, driven them off, and he was like, you know, can I have my stick back? And I was like, buddy, not a chance. This is mine. Spoils of war. And I made a little spot on my bike with like a holster where I could put that dula. So I kept it with me from that point on through the rest of Ethiopia. I loved that dula. Yeah, so that was probably the most serious case in Ethiopia where I was physically attacked, people trying to rob me. But mugged and robbed. Those are the only stories that pop into my head right now that happened to me personally. I remember going to Peru with some other people and we as a group were robbed all the time. Again, this was I think this might have been back in the 80s, like late 80s, early 90s maybe. And yeah, Peru was quite a place for robberies. I think all of South America back in those days was quite bad. And I remember we had attempted robberies of every variety. It was like an anthropological study of what happens. So everything from you put your bags on top of a van to go from Lima up into the mountains. This is like a private van, kind of an expensive thing. And then you get to your destination and all the suitcases were gone. At some point on the trip up into the Andes, people had climbed onto the top and then just threw the suitcases off the top of the van and they were just gone. Bag snatches happened to these friends of mine in the Andes in these cities up there and some a thief grabbed a bag and then just ran with it. In the markets. We would come out of the markets and find that our knapsacks, the bottom of them had been sliced open with razors, hoping that all the contents would fall out. And then in the markets, people came up to us with bottles of ketchup and mustard. And then they would come running at you and spray you in the face. And then your hands kind of come up like cleaning yourself. And then all these other people kind of move in and bump into you, distract you, and then they’re picking your pockets. That happened to us as well in Peru. Everything that could happen did happen in Peru. And when I stayed some time in Ecuador. And again, I was never robbed in Ecuador, but it seemed like everyone I met, particularly the Japanese backpackers, they were like popular targets. They were robbed constantly. But they were very trusting people, the Japanese. Very gentle, very polite. They don’t really seem to have spidey sense when it comes to bad people and then they would just do what they’re told and oh can we have your passport please and they hand it over and the guy would just run away with their passport or yeah the Japanese seem to get robbed all the time and I heard so many stories back in those days because there were internet cafes everybody every backpacker spend hours every day in the internet cafes like in later years when the internet started to emerge. And then you go into an internet cafe and then you sit there and all your attention is focused on the computer screen and you take your knapsack and you put it on the ground next to your feet and you think it’s safe because it’s right there, but then you’re there sending an email for an hour and then you look down and your bag is gone. And that happened to so many people over the years. I’ve heard stories like that and that’s where I develop the habit of always hooking the strap of my knapsack over my knee. Like if I do put it on the ground, I have the strap over my knee, so it’s always physically attached. So I never lost anything of real value that I could remember. If I went on and on about this topic, most of the theft or the attempts were from officials. Like if you’re talking about corruption, that’s a whole different story. For me, that’s been a bigger problem. Police, military checkpoints, government officials, kind of the bribery, corruption, that sort of thing is probably a bigger problem. But yeah, so those are some of my stories of muggings, being robbed, and pickpocketed in my time. But on the positive side, I’ve never had a major problem. Again, knock on wood.

Question two from Alfred Flatcap. Hi, Doug. Rocky exudes much character. Do you ever see a day when you might part? Both you and American Hobo have mentioned the vagaries of bikes in regard to availability of spokes, gearing, wheels, etc. though I guess even contemporary bikes will encounter similar dilemmas. So it appears Alfred Flatcap has given my bicycle a nickname. He’s calling my bicycle Rocky because it is a Rocky Mountain bike from a Rocky Mountain company in Canada, a Rocky Mountain Route 66. I’ve never given the bicycle a nickname. I don’t talk to my bicycle, but Alfred has given my bicycle a nickname. Apparently, it is now called Rocky, which makes sense. But he’s asking, “Do you ever see a day when you might part with Rocky?” Yeah, I mean, to be honest, I should have gotten a new bicycle many, many years ago. And I guess if I were a dedicated cyclist who really knew what I was going to be doing next and if I was a real future planner, I definitely would have gotten a new bicycle because yeah, technology advances and my bicycle I bought it in 1998 or 1999. I get the years mixed up. Could have been 98 when I bought it. So yeah, do the math. That’s 27 years ago. So, it’s a very old bicycle. And of course, components have been replaced over the years. Those aren’t the original wheels anymore. It’s not the original drivetrain. The brakes have been completely changed, but the frame and the handlebars and that sort of thing, those are all original. So, and the frame of the bike, the style of the bike, it dictates what kind of components you can put on it. So, even though I’ve added, you know, I’ve changed the wheels, changed the drivetrain, I can’t put a modern drivetrain on that bike frame. So, even when I updated the drivetrain, you know, the cassette and the cranks and that kind of thing, I still have to use an old system because that’s the only kind of system that can be mounted on my bicycle. So, technically, it is quite an old bicycle still, even if some of the components are newer than the frame. But, there were points when it made sense to just let it go and get a new bicycle. But at every one of those points, I wasn’t really gearing up for a big bicycle trip. I just needed a bicycle and I happened to have this one in storage or with me. So, I just sort of kept using it and it seemed to be in good enough condition to just keep using it. So there was never a key moment when it was like, “Ah, I’m going to go on this huge bike ride in this country or around the world or whatever, and it’s time to get updated with a new bicycle.” The one time I could have done that was when I left from Taiwan. I was working in Taiwan. I put money in the bank and I was going to go traveling and I brought my bicycle with me. At that time, that was when I should have updated everything. But I happened to have this bicycle with me when I was in Taiwan, and it seemed to be in good condition still. And it’s a tough bike. It had heavy-duty touring rims, heavy-duty spokes, had a very powerful gearing ratio for going uphill. It just seemed to make sense to keep using it. And in most countries in Asia that I’ve been in, touring bicycles are not popular. So if I go out into Malaysia, you’d be very hard pressed to find touring bicycles for sale. There might be one specialty store. I remember there’s one in Kuala Lumpur that carried Surly long haul trucker frames and you could probably get them to build you a touring bike based on that frame. But yeah, I just haven’t come across touring bikes overseas. So even in Taiwan, if I wanted to get a new bicycle, I couldn’t have gotten anything equivalent to what I was using anyway. I would have had to have flown back to Canada or gone to Europe and then you could probably get a really good touring bicycle. But then I mean a dedicated touring bike today costs thousands of dollars, costs as much as a motorcycle, you know, $3,000 if you’re talking about state-of-the-art components up to $4,000. These are expensive bicycles. And then it’s very hard to talk yourself into that because a $1,000 bicycle, that’s a really, really good bicycle today. Anybody could go around the world on a $1,000 bicycle. And then if that bicycle gets stolen, you can buy another $1,000 bicycle. You could buy four of them for the cost of a brand new like dedicated high-end touring bike. So unless you’re a very wealthy person, yeah, I don’t know. The $3,000 bikes, the $4,000 bikes, they don’t make a whole lot of sense. But do I ever see a day when I would part with my bicycle? Short answer, sure. Absolutely I would if I had the money to. I’d love to try out the new technology. The new technology, of course, is disc brakes. I’ve never had a bike with disc brakes. I don’t even know how they work. It may be that the old, you know, rubber pads on the rim, for my money, might even be superior. Disc brakes. I don’t know. I’m kind of leery about disc brakes on a touring bicycle. I kind of prefer the rubber pads. Just seems to be simple, works fine. But then you’ve got the gearing systems. So now you’ve got internal transmission on bicycles. There’s the pinion system which goes on the front and that’s like a car transmission but built into the crank of the bicycle. That has to be amazing. And then you’ve got like the hub gearing system on the back, Rohloff basically. And those are very expensive. Can only be mounted on certain bicycles, but I’d love to try them out. And then Alfred, he’s referring to the difficulty of sourcing parts for old bicycles like mine. But now when you’re dealing with pinion and Rohloff and specialized disc brakes, it’s even more of a problem. Like people who have the money to go around the world on a bicycle with pinion gearing and Rohloff hubs, they have enough money just to buy new stuff and they would have it shipped. So that’s what they have to do. You know, if you’re in the middle of Flores, like the American Hobo was, and your pinion gearing system breaks or needs maintenance, I mean, you’re not going to find anybody probably in all of Indonesia that can service that. So, you’d basically be reduced to having parts shipped in from Europe, from North America, something like that. So, it’s even more difficult to get parts for like a super high-end touring bike. But anyway, that’s a very long answer. Short answer, sure. I’m not in love with anything like I’m not particularly emotionally attached to this tablet, that camera, that GoPro, that bicycle. Sometimes I’ve had this thought that if I did come back to my bike, like right now my bicycle is parked outside, it’s locked up out there some every day when I go outside right now, I actually look and oh, it’s still there. But if that bicycle was gone, it would not affect me in any way emotionally. Nothing at all. I would go, “Oh, well, bike’s gone. I guess I have to change my trip, change my plans, buy a new bike or just grab a backpack in the market and then just keep going without a bicycle. I have no emotional attachment to that, to this camera, to this, you know. Well, I do like my Canada shirt, you know. This was a gift. Planet Doug subscriber sent me this and yeah, but you know, I’m not particularly attached to that bicycle in particular. I could easily just hop on a different bicycle and keep going.

Question three is from Ry, Patreon member. Hello, Ry. Ry has been around for almost from the beginning of Patreon. So, hey Doug, I’m curious. Was the plan always to be a traveler long-term, or did you ever consider going back to Canada, settling down, and getting a normal 9-to-5 job? I know that’s probably unrealistic now with how expensive Canada’s gotten, but was it something you thought about 20 or 30 years ago? What made you decide to keep on traveling? And looking back now, would you make that decision again? So obviously I have a lot of thoughts about a question like this. I could talk for an hour or more. I will try to not do that. But was my plan always to be a long-term traveler? No. I mean, when I first went overseas, I didn’t know what a long-term traveler was. I didn’t know there were such things. I was such a dumb, inexperienced Canadian small town country bumpkin. It’s kind of embarrassing. I mean, this goes all the way back into my childhood where all I knew was my little city, my school, my friends, my neighborhood. I was not exposed to the world in general. Even when I was young though, I remember even back then I had this idea of adventure and other countries and but I had no idea what I was talking about. Oddly enough, since I’ve spent so much time in Indonesia, when I was a kid, I talked about going to Indonesia, but even as a kid, as a teenager, I didn’t know what Indonesia was. I don’t even know why I was hooked on this idea of Indonesia. I don’t even know why I knew the name of that country as opposed to other countries. And it wasn’t until I left my hometown and went to university, first year of university, that I knew anything at all about anything. And I remember in university I tried to hide it how dumb I was because I met people from so many different walks of life, doing things and talking about things that were so beyond my experience. I was like a visitor from another planet and my brain was just like what is happening? I don’t understand any of this. How what are you talking about? But I was trying to maintain this composure like as if oh yeah this is all normal to me. And I’m talking about simple things. I remember meeting I stayed in a residence my first year in university not by choice but because I didn’t even know there was another option, right? I was just following the steps. I graduated from high school. I had good grades and everybody told me, “Well, now you go to university. That’s what you do.” So, I was like, “Okay, I guess that’s what I do.” So, I just did what everybody told me you’re supposed to do. And then you get caught up in the process where, okay, in Canada you can apply to three different universities. And I’m like, I don’t know how to choose one. And I chose one that was near my hometown like 100 kilometers away, the next big city over and I applied to that one. I applied I chose three universities at random and I got accepted at all three of them. And then I started getting packages in the mail and I chose the university nearest my hometown. And then part of the packages was, oh, residence, you can stay in the residence on campus. And I Okay, I’ll do that. And I just basically filled out the forms and I got shuffled from here to there to there. And I found myself in university living in a residence room, like a dorm room with a roommate. And then I started going to classes. And I didn’t choose really to do any of that because it was just what people did. And then I remember meeting some other students and one of them was this woman living in her own apartment in London. It was in London, Ontario where I went to university. And then so I was just chatting with her. We probably had I don’t know how we met. I can’t remember. And had a class together or something. So I’m chatting with her and oh so yeah, I’m staying in Sydenham residence. I even remember that now. The name of my residence building was Sydenham. And then I’m talking, “Oh, so what about you?” “Oh, yeah, I’ve got an apartment in the city.” And I’m like, “What?” Like, “How do you do that?” She, “Yeah, I’m just living in this.” Yeah, I rented an apartment downtown. And I had never heard of anybody going to university and just renting their own apartment and living there off campus. I was like, “You can do that?” It’s like, I never even really, how do you do that? like how do you know what to do? How did you arrange it? You know, I don’t know how I didn’t know how you did these things. And then I remember she was a very experienced person who had gone traveling around the world, had been to all these countries and I’m listening to her stories and I’m like I don’t how do you do that? Like I didn’t know anything like she was talking about going to Israel and like well okay like what do you do to go to Israel? Who do you ask? Can I go? Like, how do you buy a ticket? You bought a plane, you know? Like, I don’t know about these things. So, yeah, I was so inexperienced. I didn’t even know that it was possible to be a long-term traveler, to do any of these things. I was coming from a base level of zero. I’ve told this story in the past where I first year of university, if you’re in the social sciences, they make you sign up for certain type of courses. So I signed I was in like political science 101 and I guess the professors who teach those courses they’ve seen people like me before. So on the very first day they handed out a blank map of the world with numbers in each country. And then we were supposed to write down the names of all the countries we could identify. And I don’t remember how many I could identify but it was very very few. Embarrassingly few because yeah, I just wasn’t that type of person yet. Now, of course, you know, I could blast through that map, but that’s because I’ve been to these places. But yeah, I was a real dummy back in those days. So, I didn’t know what a long-term traveler was. It wasn’t my dream to be one. And the life that I’m living now, it started in 1991. Like before 9/11, I did go on some trips. Up until that point, I’d been to India on a youth exchange program. I’d been to Peru and on kind of like just a backpacking holiday, but I was guided with friends of mine. I didn’t know what I was doing. I couldn’t have done that on my own. Again, I was so inexperienced. The youth exchange program to India was a completely organized thing where all I had to do again was just get packages in the mail and fill out the forms and follow the steps and follow instructions and then get to the airport and then it was an organized exchange program and then I went to Guatemala for a couple of summers as part of my university studies. So, I’d been to a few places, but then in 1991, I hopped on a plane out of Toronto and I flew to Seoul, South Korea. So, that was the beginning of the story that brought me to this point talking to you. And at that point, again, I was still really, really dumb. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I’d heard stories about people who went to Asia. They went to either Japan, Taiwan, or South Korea to teach English. They got a job there teaching English, and that’s all I knew. It’s like, oh, so maybe I could do that. And then I hopped on a flight out of Toronto. There were life circumstances which made that seem like a reasonable thing to do. In the middle of winter. I think it was February and I flew into ice cold Seoul Korea. Like in the middle of an ice storm, a winter storm. Who knew Korea was so cold? I didn’t know. But anyway, so I landed in Seoul. Didn’t know anybody there. Didn’t have a job. Didn’t have a place to stay. This is pre-internet like no smartphones, no Google maps, no app to book your room, no grab to pick you up the airport. I mean just completely clueless. And I somehow survived that. That story would fill volumes. And then I eventually kind of lived in South Korea off and on for a long time working at different jobs, things like that. And at that time if you had asked me what is your plan I wouldn’t have had one but if you forced me I probably would have said like pretending I had a plan I would have said oh yeah I went to South Korea and I was going to work there for one year save up some money teaching English and then I was going to go back to Canada and get a real job. That’s what I would have told people. But I didn’t have that plan. To be honest, I barely had a plan beyond the next day. I just lived day to day. And oddly enough, my life from that day until today has been dictated by visas. Because other than your home country, you can’t just stay anywhere forever. Eventually, your visa expires. So if you don’t make any decisions about your life and what comes next, well the government makes it for you and just says, “Well, your visa is expiring. Out you go. You don’t have a choice.” And then I never really had any money. So my decision would be based on what is the cheapest place I can go to leaving this country. And you know, sounds embarrassing, but I mean, that is kind of what has driven my life to this point. It was never a plan to be anything. It was just living day-to-day. Oh, your 90-day visa has expired. Out you go. And now you’re in a new country and you’re forced to start living in that new country until your visa expired. Out you go to the next one. And I did make a few decisions in there. Of course, I decided to go to Ethiopia on a big bicycling trip. So, I was in Ethiopia for a year cycling and then, you know, I did make decisions now and again, and I finished my university degree in there somewhere, went back to university, picked up a few credits until I got my diploma. And I totally forgot about this but my original plan was to work in international development. That’s what I studied when I went to university. So that means you know working for NGOs Oxfam something like that working for the United Nations. My idea and again this might be a bit embarrassing for me is that I don’t really have any ambitions for myself like I’m not good at enjoying things. So it’s like I never wanted you know I want a big house and a fancy car staying in a fancy resort so I can swim in the swimming pool and these things. I would rather help other people do those things because they would get more pleasure out of them. I don’t really get any pleasure out of these things. Like I do talk to people that I knew from my previous life and they’re going off on trips now because they’re retired and they have a lot of money from their lifetime of working. And now they’re going out in the world and exploring all these amazing places and staying in five-star hotels and sending me messages about getting massages. Oh, I got a massage scheduled for today. And you know I had one massage in my entire life and I hated it and it just doesn’t do anything for me. So I was thinking even back in those days that since I’m not really good at pleasure, I don’t really have any needs or ambitions. I don’t want money. I don’t really need anything. Why don’t I dedicate my life to an NGO where I can go around the world and help other people. So that that was my goal to be an international helper around the world. You know that was a big thing back in the 70s, 80s and 90s. Back in those days when I was growing up, we saw the world as divided into you know developed countries and then the undeveloped countries, right? So when we were growing up we had the cliche of you’re eating dinner with your parents and you don’t want to eat your vegetables cuz you don’t like them and your mother would say you know there are starving people in Africa so you better eat your vegetables you know we thought we had food in Canada but everywhere else in the world was filled with starving children in Africa in China in Asia everywhere that that was the way we kind of grew up viewing the world and then me I thought well you know I should help all these starving people around the world. So that that was my life goal to be honest and then it never really happened for reasons that are I guess beyond this question. So yeah I’m getting way off track here. But yeah, this whole idea of going back to Canada, settling down, getting a 9-to-five job, it don’t have any strong feelings about it one way or the other. I think it’s a great life to lead, you know, a lot of security. I’m just not good at it. And I think I’m not good at it because I’m not good at planning, if you see what I mean. This might be the answer to my question, which I’m finally getting around to that. Yeah, I think that could be a great life if somebody said, “Oh, here’s a job in Canada for you. Come back to Canada. Here’s your apartment. Here’s your job 9 to 5.” I have no trouble with that at all. I mean, that’s what life is all about. But to do that and live an interesting life now, you have to work at it because you’ve got the weekend coming up. You work 9 to 5 Monday to Friday and now the weekend that’s your day to shine. So you have to plan ahead and say okay I’m going to do this this weekend and do this and go there make reservations and I could never do that. I don’t know why but I just wasn’t good at the weekend warrior lifestyle. And then contrast that with the life that I ended up leading where all I did was parachute into South Korea with nothing. I had no money, no friends, no contacts, no job, no place to live, couldn’t speak Korean. Didn’t even know what Korean food was. Didn’t know how to take a bus. I didn’t know how to get out of the airport. But you have an adventure every single day whether you want it or not. Like even here in Malaysia, I want to go out and get something to eat. Adventure just hits me in the face cuz I don’t know where to go. Even after all my time in Malaysia, I’m not an expert in Malaysian food. Every time I go into a restaurant, it’s a whole big experience. How does this place work? What kind of food do you serve? How do I order it? How do I pay for it? How do I eat it? And then, as I said, every month, every two months, your visa expires. And whether you didn’t choose to go on this adventure, but the government is forcing you to. On the plane, on the boat, on the train, on the bus, on your bicycle, crossing the border, out you go. And you have adventures every day. Every day is full of new experiences and adventures. And you don’t have to do anything. The adventures find you. And I guess that suits me because I’m not smart enough to live the 9-to-five job and have adventures at the same time. It’s just too much work and too much trouble for me, I guess. So, the time would go by without much variety. And when I’m overseas with no plan and no money and no organization, the adventures just come thick and fast and find you. So you end up having all kinds of new and exciting experiences even though like I said the adventure finds you. You don’t have to go out looking for it. Getting back to Ry’s question, the final one, what made you decide to keep on traveling and looking back now, would you make that decision again? So I think I answered that. I never did. I never decided ever to keep on traveling. It’s always been a month-to-month, day-to-day, week to week process where I just kind of lurched from one situation into another. Yeah. And would I make that decision again? I never made that decision. Would I make the decision to fly to South Korea? I made that decision. And I guess looking at it from the outside, that was a pretty big decision to make. But at the time, I didn’t really take it that seriously. I don’t know. I guess I wasn’t smart enough to worry about it, you know, like to fly into Korea, like I said, at that time with nothing, knowing nobody, with no money, that seems like terrifying now. But at that time, for whatever reason, I just did it. And I never thought about any of the problems that could occur. I just wasn’t smart enough to know that there could be, you know, this could be a bad decision to make. But would I make that decision again? Yeah, absolutely. Because I know my own personality now. And I know that I need help experiencing the world and this kind of lifestyle helps me live a more enriched life than if I were doing the 9 to 5 cuz I’m just not good at it. I’m not smart enough for that.

Only question number four. I’m going to try to go faster from FV. Hi PD Planet Doug. Can you make it to Thailand before your Malaysian visa runs out or do you envisage some train assistance? Have you thought of going into Thailand through a work visa? English teacher, as you mentioned, you may need to return to work. So, can I make it to Thailand? No. Well, yes, I could have. I decided not to. You may have seen a new video since then where I changed my route. I changed the at the time when I changed my route, counting the kilometers and the days. Yes, I could have made it to the border with Thailand and I could have cycled across, but it wouldn’t have given me enough days to enjoy the trip along the way to spend a couple of days here, a couple of days there. So, I could have cycled to the border still. I had enough time, but I looked at it and thought, I don’t really want to do that right now. So, I changed my mind and I decided to change my route to ride back to the coast. I’m currently in Malacca in Malaysia as I record this. And then from here, there’s so many more options to get out of Malaysia before my visa expires. Go to KL to hop on a flight cuz I can get there easily by bus. Keep riding my bike to Johor Bahru, cross into Singapore, take a ferry from Malacca over to Sumatra and come back or go to Johor Bahru, take a ferry to Batam which is also Indonesia and back. So, that’s what I decided to do. So, I’m not heading to the border with Thailand right now. Have I ever thought of teaching English in Thailand? Not really. If I would teach English somewhere else, but Thailand doesn’t really give me that feeling of adventure that I’m looking for. So, if I was going to look for a job teaching English, like seriously, I would probably look at perhaps Vietnam. I’ve had that bubbling in the back of my mind. I would go back to Taiwan. I used to teach Well, I wasn’t really a teacher in Taiwan. I worked at a publishing company, but I would go back to Taiwan because there does seem to be work there. I wouldn’t want to teach English because I’m not very good at it. To be honest, I’m a much I don’t know if I’m even a good editor. But anyway, I enjoyed the lifestyle of an editor, an English editor, better than teaching. Teaching for me was very tiring, very stressful, and I wouldn’t be my first choice. I would go back to teaching English, but it would have to come with a new country, a new place, exciting adventures. So, you know, I would teach English in Indonesia. I think that would be quite interesting. Vietnam. Back to Taiwan because that comes with a higher income, I think, than other countries. I mean, if somebody if I got a package in the mail that said, “Hey, we have a job for you teaching English in Uganda and it’s all set up for you. Come on in.” Yeah, I would definitely I would hop on a flight. Yeah, I’d love to do something like that. Like somewhere in Africa I think would be pretty amazing but not really in Thailand. Maybe Thailand is just too easy. It’s too easygoing life there. And yeah, I would teach English, but probably not in Thailand.

Question five from Wander Eats. I guess this may be in line with some of the other questions, but here goes. You mentioned the need for income. Have you given more thoughts on how you plan to go about this, buddy? Yeah, Wander Eats, he’s concerned with reason about my financial situation, which yeah, clearly is not good at all. And have I given more thoughts to an income? And the honest answer is yes and no. It’s here always bubbling in the back of my mind. Since I started cycling in Malaysia, I’m really enjoying it. I’m surprised at how much I just I look forward to like hopping on the bike and just and now I’m in the middle of doing a hopefully leaving Malaysia, coming back in hopefully, knock on wood, getting another 90 days, and then using those 90 days to continue my bicycle journey around Malaysia. All of my thoughts right now are focused on that and I’m really looking forward to it coming back hitting the ground back in Malaysia like here on the coast and then I’m going to ride my bike up the east coast of Malaysia hopefully across Malaysia and then back to KL. So, like doing a loop around all of Malaysia and that will be my 90 days. And that’s what I’m thinking about right now. And income, we’ll see what happens after that. Then I have to really come to grips with, okay, what happens next? And then, who knows? I could be flying to Taiwan to look for work there. Maybe someone out there on planet Doug has another idea for me. It’s like, “Oh, no, no, you could do this. You could do this.” Obviously, if my YouTube channel could produce an income of like even $1,000 a month, you know, I’m away to the races. I would just continue working on my video craft, trying to make it better, more entertaining. I mean that’s what I would love to do. I mean that would obviously be for me right now choice number one is to just continue the life I’m leading now if I could doesn’t even have to be on a bicycle cycling and YouTube it’s a bit of a conflict there it’s hard to do you need so many hours for cycling so many hours for video editing so many so much energy for cycling so much energy for editing you need two people you need 24 hours a day just for cycling, then you need 24 hours a day just for being a YouTuber. So, it may not be the best match unless I alter my style of making videos profoundly. So, but yeah, I mean, if I could make a just a basic living doing social media, providing entertaining videos, if that found an audience that enjoyed them enough, enough people watched my videos that my YouTube income, $1,000 a month, would, you know, would keep me moving to be honest, very limited needs. Then I would just keep doing what I’m doing and I would go. A lot of people keep suggesting like, “Why don’t you go here? Why don’t you go there? Why don’t you go there?” Well, it all comes down to money and if I had the money, well, yeah, line up those countries and I’ll connect the dots all the way around the world, you know, if I could. So, yeah, I’m thinking about income, but not at this moment in practical terms. My wander eats will not like to hear that. He wants to hear, “I’ve applied for this job and I’ve applied for this job and I’m doing this online to make money and I’ve got all these things in the works.” I don’t. I’m all about this cycling journey in Malaysia right now.

Question six from Rosami Rosami. Hi Doug, just curious about the cost of expenses per day inclusive of food and beverages, hotel, etc. Will you still consider camping along the way? Well, of course, I don’t have a clear answer to that question. I don’t have a budget. I don’t have a spreadsheet. I don’t keep track of everything I spend. The biggest cost by far, of course, is always hotels. And yeah, that’s a real sticking point. If you could get rid of accommodation expenses, especially considering that other than the basic features, I don’t really need a lot of the things that a hotel provides, right? So, for example, I’m staying in a twin room meant for two people. And all of these things are built into the cost of the room. I’m paying for two people. I’m paying for sheets, which I don’t need. I have my own sheets. I’m paying for a towel, which I don’t need. Soap, all these things. I don’t really even need an air conditioner. I’d be happy with a fan. But you can’t even find fan only rooms anymore. I mean, this is almost as cheap as you can get. And it still comes with everything I just mentioned. Two beds, two towels, soap, sheets, towels, hot water, air conditioning, TV. Like if you could strip out all of those things and say, “Okay, here is a room for YouTubers, you know, they need a new class of room at these hotels. Here’s your double, your twin, your standard, your deluxe, your queen, and then way down at the bottom, the YouTuber room, which is essentially a mattress on the floor with an electrical outlet right here. A fan. A window would be nice when you have a fan just to keep air moving. And a bathroom down the hall where you just dump cold water on your head. Give me that for $3 a night. That’s where I would stay cuz that’s really all I need. I don’t need I mean I like having an air conditioner. It’s pretty sweet, but I don’t need it. Don’t particularly want it, but it’s forced on me most of the time because yeah, try to find a room without an air conditioner in Malaysia. They’re very rare. It’s not like they’re listed on Agoda. I often suspect that these hotels have other rooms that they don’t tell me about. Even like in Indonesia as well because you’ll show up as a tourist and they these are the rooms and then you spend a couple of days in that hotel and you find these other rooms like down in the basement and there’s like five people jammed into each room. It’s like, “Oh, here are the cheap rooms. How come you guys didn’t tell me about these rooms?” But they’re just not available to foreigners when you show up. And an odd thing is like here in Malaysia in particular, which is, you know, more expensive for me than neighboring Indonesia. And again, I’ve been away from Canada for decades, and I’ve never lived a normal life in Canada, so I guess I’m not a good case study. But the price of accommodation in Malaysia for me, like this, a basic room like this is about 60 ringgit. That’s as low as you’re going to get 60 ringgit total. Like you might get the room for 45 ringgit per night or 40 ringgit per night, but the tourism tax, the heritage tax, the state tax, the this tax, it adds another 30 40% to the cost. So you’re going to be hard pressed to get a room for less than 60 ringgit per night. And that’s like $15 US, I think. And if you multiply that by 30, that’s $500 US a month. And I was thinking about that and it’s like I’ve never paid rent that much. I mean, $500 US is like $700, $800 Canadian. And in my entire lifetime, I’ve never had an apartment where I paid that much per month. I’ve only ever, you know, $300 a month. Back in Canada, that was a lot of money for me. So, these days I spend more money per month to stay in a hotel than I ever paid for an apartment per month, ever, which is it’s kind of weird when you think about it. And but so, okay, there you got $15 a day for a hotel. It’s kind of a minimum. And then for food, it’s all over the place. There are days I don’t eat a thing like I’ll have nothing to eat the entire day. I just drink instant coffee. So there’s you know my food and beverage budget is zero for that day. And you know a normal day might be I don’t know 20 25 ringgit for the whole day 30 ringgit two meals and some drinks in there. Anyway, something like that. So we’re not talking about a lot of money. The real expense is in accommodation and then in gear and monthly fees all related to YouTube. So I end up spending more money just on microphones that break down memory cards, you know, batteries, equipment, cameras. A lot of it has been given to me by Planet Doug subscribers. Without those gifts, I probably couldn’t even be doing, you know, what I’m doing today. With the Olympus camera and even my tablet and smartphone were handed down to me, given to me by Planet Doug subscribers. So, that has kept me going as a YouTuber cuz you need a lot. You end up needing a lot of gear. Seems that way anyway. And then I have online monthly expenses just for online storage for photos and like backup archives and a website and website hosting things like that. They add up to a surprising amount per month. And then that, yeah, ends up being a lot of money per year, but I don’t have a specific budget, you know, per day, but that that gives you, you know, kind of a vague idea.

Question seven from Sam Raj. Two questions. Question one. Having vast experience as a budget traveler from the great white north with little variety of flora and now dwelling in a region of dense equatorial rainforest with a vast array of flora. How does the difference influence you in your daily life? Sorry for the long-winded question. I mean, I’m not a big botanist. I mean, I don’t go out every day and go, “Oh, what’s the name of that tree, that flower, that plant?” I’m not out there examining these things, unless I have a particular reason to do so. But I do notice it like in my daily life. How does it affect daily life? Probably from the point of view of photography, cuz I could wander around Canada for 10 years and probably never take a picture of a plant because, oh, there’s another pine tree. You know, I mean, how many pictures of a pine tree, a spruce tree can you take? We have fall colors in Canada when the leaves change color. So maybe every year I’ll end up taking a picture of the changing color of the leaves. But here in Asia, everywhere you go, you’re stumbling across something very exotic and very colorful and very beautiful in terms of the flowers and the plant, the shape of the leaves. You know, how many pictures do I have of banana trees? I can’t help it. Every time I go by a banana tree and there’s one of those crazy banana flowers with the bananas just starting to grow, you can’t help it. It’s like you’re hypnotized. Your camera is like, “Oh, I must take a picture of that banana tree.” Same thing with all these other plants that I see all the time. I’m very accustomed to them now because I see them on a daily basis, but every time it’s like my arm has a life of its own. It’s like, oh, camera, I must take a picture. And then in a way, that’s how it affects my daily life. And when you eat food, go to restaurants, the plants have an effect on your daily life. I was at a restaurant here in Malacca just the other day doing a food pickup and they would put out like banana leaves and other plants leaves like on the table as decoration which again you would never see in Canada. So even if you’re not going out into the jungle to look at the flowers and the plants and the trees, you see them all around you all the time in Asia because they are part of daily life. People decorate even their home altars, things like that with plant life. You go to restaurants, there’s plant life everywhere and then you see it every all the time. I’m always fascinated by I don’t know if this this I mean this is flora. I guess rice fields, you know, the local crops look so dramatic. When they’re planting them and the different stages of rice growth, sugar cane, bamboo, you hear bamboo all the time when you’re out in the countryside. If you’re camping, too, you can hear them clacking together in the wind, scraping together and making a screeching sound. So yeah, daily life, the plant life, yeah, has a really big impact even on me because it’s all around you all the time and there is so much variety and as Sam Raj points out in Canada, yeah, we have our trees and flowers and things but nothing that compares to the variety that you find here.

Question two from Sam Raj. Being grounded on Planet Doug and virtually getting tied to producing quality vlogs each week, how are you able to enjoy your private personal life besides your nomad life as a YouTuber? It’s an easy question to answer in a way. I don’t have one. Everything you see in my videos is my entire life. There’s nothing other than what’s in what you see in the videos. I don’t have a personal private life. I really don’t. I’ve developed some friends here in Malaysia. Wander Eats Daryl is a good example of that. But of course, when I go to meet Daryl in Kuala Lumpur, yeah, the two of us are both bristling with cameras, even when we’re meeting for lunch, because I mean, you could call that my personal life, meeting Daryl for Sunday brunch. That’s my personal life. But I’m recording the whole thing and he’s recording the whole thing and we’re talking about microphones, talking about cameras, talking about YouTube. It’s all I do basically. I don’t have a personal life on top of this. Even like while my laptop is busy exporting a video, I take a great deal of pleasure in movies and TV shows. So I might have a TV show playing on my tablet in it taking a break waiting for the export to finish. But in the old days, I would record a Planet Doug behind the scenes video and I had a pop culture section. So even there, I’m watching the TV show and I’m making notes about it because I’m going to talk about it in my pop culture segment. I just don’t have time to make those kinds of videos anymore. So I don’t do that. But you know, so basically I don’t have a personal life. So how do I make time for it? I don’t because it doesn’t actually exist anymore. And to me that’s not a problem because even before I started shooting YouTube video to be honest I didn’t really have much of a personal life anyway. I’m all about even before YouTube my instincts are always to be kind of an archivist and perhaps an observer. So when I was going on my bicycle trips in the past before YouTube, I was taking pictures all day and every morning I would wake up in the morning and write down a long summary of the day before. I would keep a detailed journal. So I always had this instinct for not really living a personal life. I was just existing and then recording and documenting all the time anyway. And then there have been times, you know, where I’ve had other people in my life and then they would inject some kind of a personal aspect to it like, oh, let’s take a weekend trip and go here somewhere interesting. But it just didn’t come naturally to me. I just I was always kind of antsy and that probably explains, you know, why I’m single to this day because I’m just not very good at, you know, being a part of a couple and then, oh, it’s the weekend. Let’s book a B&B in this beautiful place and have a lovely breakfast and hang out in the jacuzzi or get massages. I’m like, I don’t know how to do any of that. So even if I would go off on one of these weekend personal pleasure trips, I always found myself kind of drifting away and just sort of walking down some random street, you know, just sort of doing the Planet Doug thing anyway. So I think in my entire life, I’ve never really had a personal life. A personal life kind of happened some from time to time was kind of forced on me in a way but it was never never a very comfortable fit. So yeah, and then when I had a job, it was so weird. The jobs wouldn’t have any particular deep meaning or significance in the real world, but to me it had deep meaning. So no matter how trivial the job was, even teaching English, I threw myself into it fully. Right? Other English teachers in South Korea that I knew, they would go to class and teach their classes. And when they’re outside of class, they’re just out there having a good time. They’re enjoying life and going to parties and doing things. And they had a personal life. I was preparing my next lesson plans. I was trying I was buying grammar books at the bookstore. I had a big bookshelf full of teaching material and games and activities. And I mean it was ridiculous to work that hard because I was never even a very good English teacher. But even when I was teaching English, I didn’t have a personal life because my life revolved around my work. I just love having projects. I love having things to work on. So how do I make time for a personal life? It’s not an issue because at the moment Yeah. And most of my life I just don’t have one.

Question eight from Tamaseek. Have you ever considered exploring India, Bangladesh or Pakistan on bike? So I would say in terms of traveling, of course, I’ve considered all of those countries. My first trip overseas was to India. So India has a special place in my life. I’ve been to Bangladesh. I went there for 2 months maybe. That was an amazing experience and I would very much enjoy going back. Pakistan of course is like way up there on the list of adventure travel destinations. So you always end up thinking about it’ be so cool to go to Pakistan. But on a bike, that’s where things get tricky because everyone who’s traveled in Pakistan on a bike that I’ve seen has had difficulty because of the security concerns. I was following one guy who tried to do like a classic just wandering around Pakistan on a bicycle and he just had endless trouble because of the police. Everywhere he went, they were worried about him, following him, monitoring him, and he’d be trying to camp outside and just no, not a chance. He was always being approached by the police, told, “No, you can’t stay here. You can’t go there. You can’t. It’s too dangerous. You can’t.” So, it just doesn’t seem to be a country where you can just show up like in Malaysia, Indonesia, you can just hop on your bike and just go off any direction you want. Stay in any town you want. Pakistan seems to be you have to go there with a bit of a plan and know that you can you’re allowed to go there and the local police know you’re allowed to go there and you’re not going to run into these issues. So, and then India of course has a reputation particularly among cyclists as a difficult country to explore just because of the traffic and the chaos that seems to be around you all the time when you’re on a bicycle. I would definitely do it. I think you can go to areas of India that would be fine on a bicycle, but I think you’d have to think about where you’re going, how you’re living. But it’s a big country. India man is I mean geographically it’s big but I’m thinking more in terms of all the different regions, the variety of life and languages and cultures and food and geography. I mean you could people have spent lifetimes in India just living there. You know, the hippie generation and the backpackers and travelers and they could spend a lifetime traveling in India and still end up lamenting that they haven’t even begun to see everything in the country. There’s just so much there. So, if you think about India, I kind of get overwhelmed like right from the beginning. I could go to one city in India, spend 6 months in that one city and not run out of new neighborhoods to go look at, new experiences to have. India is just so big. It’s just hard to grasp for me mentally. And then Bangladesh, when I think about Bangladesh as a travel destination, I can’t help it. I think about the river boats, the big boats on the rivers. I think that’s for me is what would make Bangladesh special. So, if I had a chance to go to Bangladesh, I might bring a bicycle, but I wouldn’t bring what I have with me here. Like I wouldn’t bring like a full-on expedition camping gear, load of gear. I would just have like maybe a folding bicycle and a backpack that I can strap to it because it’s nice to have a bicycle, but I would travel around Bangladesh by riverboat. You know, the bike might be handy to get off the boat and go exploring, but it wouldn’t be necessary. Yeah. I would think of Bangladesh as a riverboat destination. That that would really appeal to me. I think that would be a huge adventure.

Question nine from Value by. Will you go to Thailand to check out e-wallets there? Well, my original plan on this bike ride, the first part of this ride was to go to the border with Thailand and then renew my visa by crossing into Thailand, staying there for a while and then coming back. And then at that time, oh, absolutely. I was going to learn all about the e-wallets of Thailand. I think there’s a lot there. So, I was going to get a Thai e-wallet, learn how to use it, make videos about it. I was going to use touch and go in Thailand and then learn how to use touch and go, make a video about it. So yeah, definitely I would if I go to Thailand. I definitely will do that.

Question 10 on my list from Ronin Mayos. For road safety reasons, this is advice only. Please try to use secondary roads and not main roads as I see you always deal with traffic behind you and little to no bicycle lane. Malaysia is not a cyclist friendly country, so use a less busy road. Yes, 30 to 40 km a day is adequate considering the heat and sometimes sudden downpours. Stay safe, Doug. So, not really a question, it’s some advice. But, of course, in my experience in Malaysia, there are no secondary roads there. They’re very few and far between. I mean, you might find a little country road and you can follow it for a little while and it’s going to dead end at a river or it’s just going to go wandering all over here and then it’s just going to come back to the road you were on anyway. So, in my experience, it’s really hard to get off the big highways and then the secondary roads are also really really busy. So, in my experience, yeah, I’d love to be on roads that have very, very little traffic, but I don’t know if they exist. I haven’t seen them. I really haven’t. So yeah, it’s pretty hard to do. And of course you need to cover a little bit of ground unless you’re just exploring the countryside and you can just kind of wander in loops and come back to the road you are on. But I mean the roads I’ve been on here so far once I went inland. I feel perfectly content. I think in the video it looks worse for you than it does for me because you see in the video I now have the GoPro mounted off to the side. So you see behind me and I don’t see that when I’m cycling. I feel the cars and hear them, you know, whoosh whoosh whoosh going behind me all the time, but I don’t have that momentary sense of panic that you would have watching the video cuz you see them coming up behind me and oh, is he going to see Doug? Is he going to see him? And then finally the car goes out and goes around me. So you have that momentary tension every time a car is coming up from behind me. But unless I’m looking in my rear view mirror, I don’t see any of that. So, it isn’t as stressful for me on the bicycle as it is for you watching the video. That’s kind of a funny thing. And 30 40 km a day. I talked about that, but that’s only because these are like the first days on the road and I’m not in very good physical condition. So then 30 to 40 km, I mean that’s pretty much all I can do comfortably right now. But if you get in shape, even in Malaysia, you could do 80 kilometers a day, 100 I know cyclists who go through Malaysia and 100 to them is like nothing. And but they’re riding on a lightweight bicycle and they’re kind of bent over and pedaling harder and faster and staying in hotels that are nicer. And then you could do 100 to 200 kilometers a day in Malaysia even with the downpours, waterproof bags and all that kind of stuff. But 30 to 40 right now in the beginning stages of a journey that that seems sort of okay. But even I could build up to 80 kilometers a day in a country like Malaysia. Yeah, that would be fine.

Question 11 from Leo Chaplain. I am from Johor Bahru, the southernmost tip of West Malaysia. I don’t find much YouTube videos about travelers from your genre in Johor Bahru. From your personal experience, do you see Johor Bahru as a too expensive to stay place or was it due to the lack of places of interest? Or was it because JB consists of many satellite towns separated quite far from one another? I made a cup of coffee to power through the remaining questions. But yeah, for my personal experience, I’ve always wanted to go to Johor Bahru. I think it would be an interesting town for a few reasons. One, I mean, every town is interesting for me. I can hang out anywhere and spend a month there and then find new and interesting neighborhoods and things like that. But Johor Bahru actually has a lot of history, a lot more than most people realize. People tend to focus of course on Singapore and Malacca. Well, but as soon as you start reading about the history of the Malacca Sultanate, which ties into the history of Malaysia, well, you find out that the Johor Sultanate had just as much of an influence and that they are connected historically in so many ways. So, there’s a lot of history in Johor Bahru and I think it’d be an interesting town. I just haven’t been there in my time in Malaysia just because of the way my life has turned out, I guess. I should have gone there and I have been there actually, but that would have been back in the ’90s. I traveled through Johor Bahru and then into Singapore. So, speaking for other people, other YouTubers, I don’t know why there isn’t a lot of content about Johor Bahru. It could be because it just gets lost in the shuffle. People go to Malaysia and then it’s just, well, it just happens. There’s so much gravitational pull around Kuala Lumpur, Malacca and then Singapore and then Johor Bahru kind of gets lost in the shuffle perhaps. But I think it might be a very interesting place to visit just on its own merits and its role in Malaysian history.

Question 12 is kind of related to that previous question. Will you ever go to Singapore? It is way more expensive. I have been to Singapore. I think I’ve been there twice and yes, it is way more expensive. I remember the shock of going from Malaysia to Singapore, making a plan to do so and then looking for hotels. And I was like, whoa, okay, that’s expensive compared to Malaysia, compared to Indonesia, Vietnam. Yeah, Singapore is much more expensive for hotels in particular. Once you’re there, you can kind of live, unless you’re out there doing all the attractions and going to all the finest restaurants, you can still live a relatively low-budget kind of existence. In terms of going to restaurants, finding food, things like that, the markets, more expensive than Malaysia, but not outrageously. So, it was the accommodation that was the real difference for me. Will I ever go to Singapore again? I mean, it’s a possibility. Yeah, it could happen. It’s got that border crossing with Malaysia. If you’re on a bicycle, you know, you can just ride your bicycle across the bridge, I think. Just join the row of scooters. A lot of long-distance cyclists start in Singapore and then they ride north, cross the bridges over to Johor Bahru into Malaysia. So, it’s a yeah, I mean, it’s there as an interesting exchange, you know, between the two countries. So, yeah, could end up there again.

Question 13. When I saw what you and American Hobo suffered, bicycles broke down. I felt sorry and helpless after 5 years of riding your bike in Southeast Asia. As a road user, I am sure you have some foresight inkling that your bike will suffer wear and tear in due time. To avoid your Kuala Pilah incident, I would advise your good self to overhaul your bike after some long distance mileage. I am not a professional bike rider, but I would like you to find out the lifespan of the bicycle parts, tire, master link, derailleur, bicycle rim, and spokes, etc. Yeah, it’s very good advice. It’s something I should have done a long time ago where people know how long, for example, a chain is supposed to last. I think that is the most important thing to keep up on because you’ve got the drive system which consists of the chain, the cassette, the derailleurs, and the crank set and the hub, the bottom bracket there, and they all wear out. But the chain, especially when you’re bike touring, will stretch because you’re going uphill with a really heavy load and you put a lot of tension on the chain, the chain will start to stretch. And if it stretches too far now, it starts grinding on the sprockets and they all the teeth of the sprockets on the cassette and the crank set, they start wearing down. May get little sharp teeth points and then you might say, “Oh, your chain is broken. You need to replace the chain.” But now it’s too late. If you buy a new chain, it doesn’t match the wear patterns on the sprockets anymore. So, you put a new chain on that bike, it’s just going to skip and skip and skip and it won’t work properly. So, if you don’t replace your chain on time, you end up having to replace the entire drivetrain, and that’s a much bigger job and much more expensive. So, you should make a note somewhere, keep a list how many miles on the chain, how many miles on these tires, how many miles on the rim spokes, and then just keep track of these things. And then you can do routine maintenance and upgrading of parts. You should do that, but I have never done that. Particularly I guess I mean I’ve never had major problems. I’ve never had a tire blow out on me before. I’ve never really had major breakdowns that I can think of on my bicycle trips in the past. So, it hasn’t been and I’ve never gone on like multi-year round the world journeys. So, if you’re going on a journey that’s going to last years and tens of thousands of miles and kilometers, well, yeah, then you want to just like having a car, regular oil changes and oil and filter changes, things like that. On a bike, you know, you change your chain, change your tires, spokes, whatever, every, you know, number of kilometers. So, yeah, you really should keep track of that stuff.

Question 14 is from Tom Cam. Doug, what I totally do not understand, why did you not use the train to come direct to Kota Bharu, stay some days there and exploring this interesting city and then ride your bicycle the 20 some kilometers to the Thai border and leave Malaysia this way. Much cheaper as what you are doing now and also for the future better because then you can do the east coast when you re-enter Malaysia. Why not that way? Well, there’s a pretty simple answer to that question because I never thought of it. It never even entered my mind as an option. So, what Tom is talking about is that I was trying to ride my bike through the middle of Malaysia to the border with Thailand before my visa expires and then cross into Thailand and then come back into Malaysia with a new visa. And that was the plan. But through poor planning, major holiday problems, my bicycle breaking down, and then having the opportunity to stay in a nice hotel in Seremban for a few nights. Yeah, I just I decided there wasn’t enough time to make that journey comfortably. So, I decided to turn south and come down to the coast. And he’s saying, instead of turning south, why didn’t you just hop on a train, zip up to Kota Bharu, now you’re there lots of time, cross the border, and then come down the east coast? Yeah, I mean, it’s a reasonable plan. It would have been something I consider except I didn’t even know it was a possibility. I know there is he’s talking about the jungle train I guess the jungle train maybe that goes up to Kota Bharu and that’s a popular thing for some like adventure travelers to do or people who really like trains. And I guess I could have bought a ticket on that train, put my bike on that train and just zipped all the way up to Kota Bharu. So, I still could have gone north. Still could have gone into Thailand. But I don’t know, never even occurred to me. I didn’t think it was possible to put a bicycle on that train. I don’t know anything about that train. I don’t know where it starts from. I don’t know where it goes. I know a lot more now since Tom mentioned it. I’ve done research into it and it’s like, oh yeah, you know, that might not have been a bad option. But yeah, I just didn’t know about it. Basically never even entered my brain that I could have done something like that.

Question 15. Any plan to come back to Canada in the near or far future, especially for health care needs? Not jinx, not jinxing, just a general question. I mean, I always have a plan in the back of my mind to go back to Canada, but mainly just a visit. I don’t really have any plan to go back to Canada permanently at this point. The way I’ve lived my life, as could be obvious by now if you’ve listened to my rambling here, I don’t have the money to do that. I can’t live in Canada anymore because I haven’t followed the classic Canadian pattern of working, saving money, putting money into investments and property and retirement and all that. I don’t even know how any of that stuff works. So, the option of moving back to Canada, retiring in Canada, and then living there in my sunset years, it’s not even an option at this point. I would be going back to Canada flat broke and I couldn’t live in Canada anymore anyway. I would have to get a job there or throw myself on the mercy of the state in some fashion. And of course health care in Canada, we have national health care coverage and that I think for Canadians is often on the back of their mind when they become elderly and they start suffering, their body starts breaking down, they start suffering from various illnesses. Well, at least we have that. There is a safety net of a national health care system and I’ve seen it work very very well for a lot of people in Canada. But I do have a little bit of another perspective on it because I don’t know, maybe I’m being naive, but I do have this idea that enough life is enough life. Like even now at 62 years old, still in perfect health as far as I know, I feel like I’ve won the lottery. Like I’m good. Like compared to history, compared to a lot of people who suffer from illnesses earlier in life that limit their options and mobility and involve hospital stays and expenses. I haven’t had to deal with any of that. So, as far as I’m concerned at 62 years old, I’m good. Like, who knows? Maybe when the reality kicks in, I might be singing a different tune. But as a healthy person sitting here today, my idea is that well if I suddenly have this sharp pain and I go to the hospital and they discover that oh you have advanced stage whatever stage they are stage 4 cancer of one kind or another. My feeling would be oh well guess my life is kind of over. Personally, I wouldn’t feel like, “Oh, what a tragedy.” Because, yeah, I’ve had a good life, good health, 62. It’s time for my body to start breaking down, and that’s just what happens. And I don’t think I would have the attitude of kicking and screaming and clawing to try and just extend my life as long as possible. I think I would have a more philosophical attitude to it like okay now we’re basically my life is ending now and if there were easy health care options to treat whatever illness I suddenly have sure I would look into it but I would not want my life to be taken over by health concerns and be turned into this endless circus of doctor visits and prescriptions and hospital and surgeries and this and that. I’m hoping I will just let my life end naturally. Whatever. I’m assuming that one day over the next, you know, between 60 and 70 something is going to pop up and it’s going to be like, ah, this is what is going to kill you. And I’ll just look at it and go, all right, fair enough. I’ve lived long enough as far as I’m concerned. So, I guess the answer to that question is, yeah, I would love to go back to Canada for a visit. I feel like I’m way overdue for that. It would have been nice over the past like I’ve been physically been out of Canada right now for 10, 11, 12, no 19. No, 18 years. Yeah. The last time I was in Canada physically, I think, was 18 years ago. And it would have been better I think for me physically, logistically, mental health, variety of life. I probably should have flown back to Canada two or three times within those 18 years at least just to touch base with my roots, who I am, family, all that kind of stuff. And not even lesser concern would be dealing with paperwork, keeping your driver’s license updated and banking stuff and just keeping on top of all of that and that becomes very difficult to handle the longer you stay out of your home country. Everything just collapses. It’s like a house of cards that comes down and by the time you go back to Canada after 20 years, you’re starting from nothing. It’s like, oh, are you even a Canadian citizen? Because you just have nothing. You got no employment record. Your driver’s license expired decades ago. You’re down to one credit card, one bank account that are holding on by the skin of their teeth. You know, your entire life just falls apart over time if you don’t go home and just sort of maintain things. So, it would have been nice to go back from time to time. And it would be really nice, like if I had the money to do it. I’ve been talking about how excited I am about this cycling trip around Malaysia that I’m in the middle of and I’m going to complete. But it would be nice to plan ahead and say, “Oh, when I get back to KL, hop on a flight back to Canada.” and then wow that would be amazing but that gets down to yeah it’s a very expensive trip and I have nowhere to live in Canada I don’t have a house I don’t have an apartment I remember when I was younger going on trips around the world I took advantage of my parents house because my mother and father were still alive in those days and they were still living in our family home and there were empty rooms in the basement empty rooms on the top floor and then I would fly in from some country and then you know I’d go back home, visit my parents and live in their house for a while so that I can get reorganized, get resettled and then move on somewhere else, dump some stuff, put some stuff in storage, get some other stuff and their house was my mailing address. But then when you get my age, of course, you don’t have that anymore. You can’t just go home and live with your parents, you know, live in your parents’ basement anymore and count on your mother to monitor your mail and keep everything up to date for you. Yeah, you don’t have that anymore. But yeah, if I go back to Canada now, I do have to think about, well, okay, I fly into Toronto. Now, what do I do? I can’t afford to stay in a hotel in Canada. It’s not like I can hop on a train, go to my hometown, and check into the Holiday Inn for a month. Yeah, I don’t have the money to do that. So, yeah, Canada is a little bit it’s a difficult place to go visit these days.

Question 16 from Broken Armor Girl. Broken Armor Girl, I think I followed your Planet Doug YouTube channel since the Cycling Canadian back in 2018, but I can’t remember if you ever visited Kota Bharu before. My hometown is in Kota Bharu. I’m curious if you ever had any plan to stay longer there in the future. I think Kota Bharu suits your style because it’s not a big developed town, just enough for bustling life and mix culture between Malay and Thailand. Of course, it’s food heaven and much cheaper, too. Kota Bharu also have river life from Sungai Kelantan. You can explore. Yeah, I needed someone like Broken Armor Girl to come visit me when I was in Kuala Lumpur and knock on my head and go like, “Hey, get out of Kuala Lumpur. Why don’t you go to Kota Bharu?” And I think it would have been a very good idea if I had broken out of the KL gravity zone a long time ago and done more traveling around Malaysia. But back in those days, I was thinking of KL more as kind of I was thinking of Malaysia more as a base. So I didn’t really come to Malaysia originally with the idea of traveling around Malaysia. I remember I flew into KL because even back then when I first came here, my bicycle was in bad shape. It needed to be repaired. I had an Olympus camera back then. I had tripped and fallen while I was in the Philippines and I smashed the camera on the ground. It was broken and I kind of flew into KL out of the Philippines because I thought of KL as a place where I can get everything fixed, get my bike fixed, get my camera fixed, and then I was going to continue cycling the rest of my journey. But not to go too far back in time, but then for whatever reason, I came up with this idea to start recording my life for YouTube. And then I kind of got lost in YouTube video, GoPro cameras. And then I thought, okay, let’s learn how to shoot video first without cycling. And then once I get YouTube up and running, then I can travel around Malaysia on my bicycle, go to Johor, Terengganu, Kota Bharu, Terengganu, and then continue north. And you know, I was going to continue my journey basically. But ever since my life melded with YouTube, I don’t know, things just never came together in a way where I suddenly was like, “Ah, everything’s working. Everything is hitting all the cylinders are firing. It’s time to now start traveling, you know, on my bicycle, shooting videos for YouTube. I don’t know. I just sort of got caught up in living in KL and then taking trips to Myanmar and back, Bangladesh and back, Sumatra and back, Sumatra and back, Sumatra and back. And then of course I went to Myanmar again. And that’s when the pandemic hit. So then I was in Thailand for two and a half years while my bicycle essentially was rotting away in storage in Kuala Lumpur and I was waiting and waiting and waiting for the border to open because all of my gear, all of my possessions, everything was in storage in KL. And then finally when the pandemic was over and then I finally came back to KL. Yeah. So anyway, I would have loved to go to Kota Bharu at some time. I think Broken Armor Girl is absolutely correct. It seems like Kota Bharu and Terengganu, those are my kind of towns. Just looking at them from Google Maps satellite view, being on the coast, the river systems, the hills nearby, the islands, the fishing boats. I think I would love both of those towns. And I’m on my way there. Assuming everything goes well with my current plans for renewing my visa in Malaysia, I’ll be returning to Malaysia with 90 days and then my plan is to ride my bicycle up the east coast with my eye on getting to Kota Bharu. So, that’s the next part of my journey. So, I am on my way to Kota Bharu and I think I’m going to love it there. And once I get there, I’ll probably go, “Ah, why didn’t I come here sooner?” I can already feel that feeling coming on.

Question 17. And I think this question will be on the minds of a lot of people. So I think this question will answer questions for a lot of people out there who may have thought about this but didn’t actually ask the question. It’s about safety. So, question 17. I’ve really been enjoying your cycling videos lately. It is great to see your journeys, though I find myself wondering about a few of your safety choices. Helmet. I personally wouldn’t feel comfortable cycling to the shops without a helmet, let alone navigating the busy roads in Malaysia. I’m curious to know your thoughts on why you choose not to wear one. Visibility. While the footage is fantastic, I sometimes worry about how visible you are to other road users. Have you ever considered adding high visibility gear or a flag for your trailer? I’d love to hear your perspective on this as I’m sure it’s something you’ve thought about quite a bit. Well, personally, no. I don’t think about it at all. I grew up in the 60s and the 70s. It was a very different world back then. Nowadays, safety is like a religion. I mean, there’s just like this constant drum beat. Safety, safety, safety. And I didn’t grow up in that world. And to be honest, I have very little patience for it. I’m a very logical fellow. And if you present me with something that makes sense and is logical and factual, I’m all over it. But if something is just based on feeling, then I’m not really that interested. So that’s basically my approach to the modern safety culture that seems to be out there. I mean, this is something I’ve talked about in the past, but the only reason I’ve talked about it is because people do ask me this question routinely because they’re so accustomed to seeing cyclists with helmets. Every time you see a cyclist on YouTube, they’ve got a helmet on their head and then they suddenly see me and it’s kind of shocking. It’s like, what the heck? Why isn’t he wearing a helmet? And then people start, you know, it’s like, ah, they get very, very nervous. But my overall feeling is that this cycling helmet business is more about how people feel than anything else. It’s how it looks, not that it actually has any effect at all in terms of safety. And I mean, I could go into that as deep as you’d like because it is a topic that has come up a number of times. Yeah, when you’re bike touring, for example, 90% of the time I’m doing 5 kilometers an hour, you know, I’m just grinding uphill. And then for me to be wearing this uncomfortable, sweaty, weird helmet and having every time I talk stop the bike, you’re taking the helmet off, you’re fighting with the strap, and then you’re putting it here and you forgot it. You got to I mean to me wearing a helmet would be a nightmare to convince me to wear a bicycle helmet. Man, you’re going to have to line up a lot of very compelling evidence. And I’ve never seen any evidence that a cycling helmet does anything for anybody on a long-distance bicycle tour like mine. In fact, I’ve seen a lot of anecdotal evidence and had a lot of experiences where I could argue probably more strongly that the helmet causes more accidents than it prevents because it just gets in the way. It limits your vision. And people are fumbling with the strap doing this and then they crash into something because they’re so busy messing with their helmets or and I’ve seen studies about this where they studied towns where a helmet law was introduced and they found that traffic fatalities and injuries went up because when they put in a helmet law, people just stopped riding bicycles. So instead of riding their bicycle to the corner store, now everybody just can’t be bothered wearing a helmet. So they just skip the bike and they get in their car to drive to the 7-Eleven to get their liter of ice cold Coke. And then they have a car accident on the way because in their mind, they’re not really driving. They’re just zipping to the store and back. So accidents would rise when they implemented a helmet law. And of course you could argue that health decreases because you tell everybody you always have to wear a helmet. Nobody rides a bike anymore because the helmet is just such a pain in the butt. So, people drive more, get less exercise. Anyway, I could argue against helmets all day long, you know, if you wanted me to. And I’ll offer this perspective up as well. You see me without a helmet, it makes you uncomfortable. You see another cyclist going around Malaysia, they’re wearing a helmet makes you more comfortable, but I can almost guarantee you that helmet they’re wearing is completely useless because 90% of the helmets that people buy, they’re not safety rated anyway. So, they just grab the cheapest piece of junk, little plastic shell that you can pick up in some random bike shop that costs $5. You put that on your head and you think you’re protected, but you’re not because those helmets don’t actually do anything. A real helmet that provides safety to your brain in a real collision. Those have to be particular helmets, expensive ones that are well-designed for that impact. And those are the kinds of helmets that even if you do have an accident and you hit the helmet one time, that helmet’s done. Its safety structure is now compromised and you would have to buy a new helmet. But the vast majority of people you see with helmets on those helmets, they might as well have a paper plate on their head, if they get hit, they fall over, smack their head on the pavement with that helmet, it’s not going to provide any protection anyway. And even if it provided some protection, it has to be properly fitting and that chin strap has to be tight holding it in place. And nobody does that. So, you know, you look at all these long-distance cyclists. They’re wearing a helmet. You feel better. But look at that chin strap. It’s so loose because, you know, you can’t have that thing cutting into your neck all the time. If you’re in some kind of a race and you’re going 80 kilometers an hour downhill in a peloton, is that what it’s called? A group of cyclists with a real risk of accidents. Yeah. I’m putting on a helmet, but when I’m grinding up a road 5 kilometers an hour, the helmet is not going to do anything. So I guess those are some of my thoughts about the helmet. Is there another one? I think there must be another one. Yeah, I think I’ll end it there as far as the helmets are concerned. I could go on. The second one is visibility. Like that you could make a better case for. In fact, the trailer that I have when I bought it, it came with a flag and it has like this special mounting apparatus and I might still be using the flag today except the company that built this trailer, the flag attachment point was just a piece of junk. It was just I mean it was a solid piece of aluminum really heavy duty but the way you mounted it on the trailer it was just so awkward. You kind of put it on and you had to take it off every single time you move the wheels of the trailer and it just became such a huge hassle. I just sort of gave up on it. It’s like oh this stupid thing. If there was something really easy for a flag, maybe I would have it on there, but again, I don’t think it’s necessary. It makes people feel better to have high viz vests and flags and bright colors and flashing lights, things like that. It makes people feel safer, but in my experience, it doesn’t actually make them any safer at all. I mean, I’ve been following long-distance cyclists my whole life, and I’m always watching stories in the news, so I have seen stories over the years where cyclists were killed overseas. Thailand is kind of famous for that. I haven’t heard of one for a long time, but there have been long-distance cyclists in Thailand, like two of them traveling together and then one or two of them will both be killed because they get hit by a truck or a car or something. But in the vast majority of those cases, they’ve been hit from behind, of course, by like a pickup truck doing 100 miles an hour and the driver is either drunk or just not paying attention or on their phone. And if you get hit by one of those trucks from behind, the helmet is not going to do you one bit of good. You’re dead no matter what. The helmet is not going to work there. And high visibility, the driver isn’t even looking. Like in most accidents that I’ve seen, it was always because the driver was coming up from behind and you could have been on an elephant covered in neon lights and they still would have hit you because they’re just not looking. You could have a flag, a light, flashing lights, high viz vest, and all the accidents I’ve seen, it’s just they’re not paying attention. They’re drunk. And also, most of the accidents I’ve seen in my lifetime, even stories about backpackers who have accidents on their scooters, right? They rent a scooter in Thailand and then you see a story about them where they had a bad accident and they’re in a hospital and they’re covered in scrapes like road rash. And then they argue that even on a scooter you should wear safety gear like head to toe rubber and armor so that when you crash you can slide along the pavement. And all these people who ride a scooter in shorts and a t-shirt people will criticize them. No, you should be wearing elbow pads and shoulder pads and a helmet and this and this and this and this. But every time I see one of those stories, it turns out that they were drunk leaving the bar at 2:00 in the morning in the dark. So yeah, that’s what caused the accident. It had nothing to do with the scooter and the way I live my life. I’m not out till 2 in the morning. I’m not drinking. I’m not dancing. I’m not driving a scooter or a bicycle in the dark ever if I can help it. So, my approach to safety is just don’t do any of those things and then you’ll probably be okay. And I can feel so many helmet people out there just going, you know, but I can circle back around to the helmet idea that if you wanted to convince me to wear a helmet during my slow bicycle tour, you would also have to explain to me why you’re not wearing a helmet in your bathroom. Because like even in my experience as a backpacker in Asia, the most dangerous thing I’ve ever encountered have been the bathrooms slipping and falling. I was in Port Dickson not long ago and I was staying in this kind of a wedding center and the bathroom was outside of my room and one morning I had to move pretty quickly so I left my room and this wasn’t even in the bathroom. This was like on this there was like a set of two small stairs and then it was kind of a dark room dimly lit and I needed to go to the bathroom, get back to my room and leave. So I’m moving a little bit faster than I normally do and I think I was carrying a few things. I made it awkward. So I left my room and then I’m going down the steps and there had been a rainfall and a flood in the dark that I didn’t see. So there was a puddle at the bottom of the stairs and then of course I was going down the stairs pretty quickly. I hit that puddle and I hit the ground so hard. I have never hit the ground so hard in my life. Just went up and then slam and by chance, by luck, my body took the brunt of the impact. And I just lay there on the floor in almost in a state of shock. I hit so hard. I just like lying there. I was like, I think I just died. I hit so hard. I don’t think I can move. And I just lay there for the longest time. And then finally, I just kind of moved over to my side and then kind of got back up. That’s when you should be wearing a helmet. And the same thing happens in bathrooms all the time, not just in Southeast Asia, but everywhere in the world. Look into the statistics. Household accidents, falling down the stairs, slipping in the bathroom, slipping like I just did in the hallway. Those cause more head injuries than any cycling accident. So basically, you should wear a helmet in your house every time you go to the bathroom. And even as a pedestrian, people get hit by cars as pedestrians more often than they do as cyclists. So every pedestrian, anyone walking down the street should be wearing a helmet. So if your logic is the helmet prevents head injuries, then you should be wearing a helmet while walking down the busy streets of KL because you’re in more danger than I am on the bicycle. Right? Anyway, that’s the Planet Doug basic approach to safety. Whether you find those arguments compelling or not. Anyway, you’re going to have to do a lot of work to get a helmet on this head.

Question 18 from Second Swing Golf. Love your videos. Really admire your fitness. Now approaching 70, I am more and more aware of my muscle loss in the 60s. Sarcopenia. Are you conscious of this and take any measures like extra protein etc. I suppose my attitude towards health and diet and exercise is very similar to my attitude towards safety. I don’t know again I grew up in the 60s and 70s and nobody cared about these things. I mean your mother gave you a balanced diet. Every meal in Canada had meat and potatoes and veggies. And I remember my mother giving us a little multivitamin with every breakfast. It was this brown little tablet that, you know, she’s caring for her children and worried about our health. And so we would take this whatever this thing was for multivitamins, Flintstone vitamins, but there wasn’t a whole lot going on back in those days about particularly specific diets and things like that and health. And I just sort of have kept that attitude going throughout my lifetime. And I guess I’ve been pretty lucky in terms of health. I keep saying that. And I better keep knocking on this wood so I don’t jinx myself. But I’ve never in my life really thought about food. I’ve never thought about diet. I’ve never thought about exercise, anything like that. Somebody asked me recently about doctor’s visits. And I started thinking like the last time I went to a doctor, like a real doctor, and had a health checkup, I’m pretty sure I was 18 years old. It was the last time I really saw a doctor for that purpose. And whether that’s, you know, folly or what it is, but that’s kind of how my life has gone. So no, I haven’t really thought about muscle loss. I might be aware of it, but I’ve never had muscles to begin with. I’ve never been a muscular person, so I don’t have muscles to lose to begin with. And my body has basically done everything I’ve ever asked it to do without much preparation. I’m not an athlete, obviously. I played hockey as a young man in Canada. But that’s as far as my sports goes. I don’t exercise. I don’t join gyms. I don’t play sports. I don’t do anything like that. And yet every time I come up with some crazy idea like, oh, you know what? I’m going to ride my bicycle through Guinea in West Africa, I don’t do anything physically to prepare other than vaccinations and I got rabies shots and, you know, yellow fever and, you know, you prepare for that kind of stuff, hepatitis. Water filters, of course, water purification was a big thing back in those days. It’s not much of a concern anymore. Sleeping under a mosquito net a lot whenever I could because of the risk of malaria. So, I did those physical measures, but I didn’t exercise. I didn’t practice. I didn’t go cycling. I just landed in Guinea and with my bicycle. And then one morning, I got on and just started riding and my body just handled it fine. So, I’ve never done anything like that. So, I don’t have any particular measures about eating more protein. I don’t really think about what I eat. Yeah. But I don’t know if that’s a satisfying answer either, but that’s always been my attitude.

Question 19. I should be able to answer this one quickly because it’s kind of a call back from Bing Lim. I know you have been asked this before, but just want an update. How are your finances going? Are you looking at going back into the workforce? How are my finances going? I would basically say, what finances? I don’t have any finances at this point. Not at all. When I left from Taiwan a long time ago and I was leaving a job at that point for people who don’t know my history and I’d been working pretty steadily in Taiwan and I saved some money and I probably should have invested that money and started a business or done something with it but instead I just put it in a bank account and just started withdrawing money from it. It’s almost like filling a sink with money and then pulling the plug and watching it drain away. That’s basically what I’ve been doing for all the last number of years and all through my YouTube life as well. There’s no money going in really to refill that sink. It’s just draining away. So that’s what I did. So I have no finances basically and I’m basically at the point where yeah I have to pretty much think seriously about getting a job somewhere and as I mentioned earlier replying to Wander Eats’s question right now mentally I’m focused really on this bicycle trip once I get a new visa for Malaysia in particular and then continuing my ride up the east coast and continue a loop around Malaysia that all of my thoughts are on that and finances are on the back burner, but it is an issue I do have to think about. So, I’m thinking about going back into the workforce. Of course, I have to I don’t know whether anybody will hire me anymore. We’ll see how that goes in a few months from now.

A new subject, a new area, a new type of question. This is question 20 from Street Level Critic. First of all, I want to thank you for all the hard work you put into your channel. I know the struggle of setting up cameras, video cards, microphones, straps, poles, and grips only to put it all together during editing and then upload it to YouTube. I have a few random questions that I hope you can answer. My first question is, when was the last time you saw a movie at a theater? And is there any movie that would entice you to go in 2026? My second question is, what would your dream touring bike setup be? I would love to hear the minutia about your dream setup with your bike trailer and everything included. Lastly, would you ever consider visiting Brazil? I’m a proud member of the CC Club. Ah, great question. Yeah, Street Level Critic. His YouTube channel, I think he’s a movie fan. Movie and television. So when he says Street Level Critic, he’s talking about movie reviews. So you can go to his channel and if I went to the right Street Level Critic, he has a bunch of movie reviews, movie trailer reviews. So he has a personal interest in movies and television which I share and he knows about shooting video for YouTube because he has a lot of videos on his YouTube channel. So, soul brothers when it comes to those two topics. So, is there a movie that would entice me to go back to the theater? Because I don’t know how he knows I don’t go to the theater. I probably talked about it at some point, but yeah, I don’t. I gave up on movie theaters even when I was living back in Taiwan. I love movies, but movie theaters, I think I was finally broken of the habit in Taiwan because the quality of the theater experience was not suited to me. I mean, sure, they were big, beautiful screens, loud sound systems, air conditioning, all that kind of stuff, but everything was raised to a level that made me uncomfortable. So, sure, they had a state-of-the-art Dolby sound system, but they crank the volume. I literally wore earplugs to go to the movie theater. And I remember going to a theater and forgetting to bring earplugs and then the sound started like I was like, “Oh, for Pete’s sake, it hurts.” And I would be upset that I forgot my earplugs. And if I had like earphones for, you know, listening to a podcast or music, I would put in the earphones just to deaden it a little bit. It was so loud, it was uncomfortable, and it was distorted. And then it was so distorted that I couldn’t hear the dialogue very clearly, even in English. And a lot of the local people were just reading the Chinese subtitles anyway. So audio and for like listening to the spoken voice was not a big concern in Taiwan. So I just found the audio way too loud and way too uncomfortable. And the temperature. I would forget again and again and again that when you go to the movie theater, you got to bring a sleeping bag, a parka, a hat, gloves, a scarf, long pants, you know, cuz they lower the temperature to a point where you freeze to death. And I would always forget and I would just, you know, I’m wearing thin pants and a t-shirt and, oh yeah, movie. Let’s go see a movie. I pop in there and just I get so cold I get a headache and I thought I can’t handle that. It’s just too cold. And then people, you know, the smartphone era where everybody’s on their phone lighting up different parts of the theater as they’re looking at their phones. The eating, again, this was a thing in Taiwan, part of, I guess, part of Asian culture in general. Food is so central to everything. Nothing can happen without food. Me, I go to the movie theater with nothing. Like when I went to the theater in Canada in the old days, I would go in streamlined, stripped down, minimalist, and back in those days, there’s no reserved seating or anything. I would go into the movie theater with nothing. I would go by myself, so I’m not even distracted by conversation or other people. And then I’d find a seat way on the far left side or the far like sitting against the wall just so I could be as far away from other people as possible. I didn’t care that I was looking at the screen on an angle rather than sitting in the middle with all the other people because in Taiwan, man, they go to the movie theater for them. It’s a picnic. Just immense amounts of food of all kinds. Just eating and eating and eating and just the everybody moving all the time. The hand movement was distracting, the noise of the crunching and the slurping and the talking about food and here have some of this. Oh, can I what do you got? You know, it’s like all right, I’ve had enough of movie theaters and I just don’t go back anymore. And I remember when I was living in Thailand during the pandemic, I was making YouTube videos, but they, you know, they’re pretty casual. They were like, I may even, the channel was probably called the Cycling Canadian back then, even though I didn’t even have a bicycle. And I was recording videos just as I was walking around the town. And then I recorded some scooter trip videos when the restrictions were easing up a little bit, but my laptop was broken back in those days for a long time. And I didn’t have a laptop, I didn’t have a tablet, I didn’t have anything, but I did have a smartphone. And I would watch movies on my phone. So, I would much rather watch a movie or any TV show on my phone instead of going to the theater. And the key thing is the audio because even though I’m just watching it on a tiny screen, I would always plug in earphones and I would listen on earphones so the audio was as crisp and clear as possible. And in all movies, I always turn on the subtitles. Even English movies, for some reason, if I hear someone say something and I read it at the same time, it registers more. So, even though I’m a native speaker of English, I always turn on the English captions, English subtitles. So, yeah. So, anyway, that was a very long wandering answer. His question was, “Is there any movie that would get me back into the theater?” And, honestly, for me personally, no. There’s none that would do that. It’s more about the physical environment. I don’t really care about the movie that much. I remember before I embarked on this life in Southeast Asia, I was living in Toronto. There was a repertoire cinema there. It showed old movies during the day and at odd times, old classics, and they were very inexpensive and I went to those a lot. But again, it was more and nothing it wasn’t because you know the newest blockbuster, the newest Avatar, you know, I have no time for these big blockbuster events like Avatar. I just find the Avatar movies so utterly boring. I do not get their appeal. But I guess the appeal is that they’re visually stunning, I guess. And you go to the theater and you’re like, “Wow, that looks so amazing.” But that’s not why I watch movies. I’m there for story, character, dialogue, things like that. So, the whole visual stuff. I had that thought recently where out of nowhere the trailers for the new Supergirl movie appeared online. And I mean, that’s a big pop culture event. I guess it’s going to be a tent pole movie for the summer. I guess in North America and I like to watch reactors on YouTube like these people that watch Oh, just like yeah, Street Level Critic. I enjoy channels like that where he watches the trailer, I watch it along with him and then he talks about his impressions of it and I watch all these reaction channels all the time. So, when I saw that there was a Supergirl trailer, I went to all I watched the trailer myself, had my own reaction to it. More about that in a second. And then I went to all these reaction channels to watch them watch the trailer and hear them talk about it. And I was so surprised because all of these reaction channels were so excited. They watched the trailer for Supergirl and all of them went, “Wow, that was amazing.” One of them was crying, was thought it was so emotional and they can’t wait. And then Jason Momoa is in it. And then when Jason Momoa showed up, everybody goes nuts. And they know the characters that they’re playing cuz I guess they’re part of the Supergirl lore, some villain that they recognize. Oh, I’ve been waiting to see this villain on screen. They were going crazy for it. I watched the trailer and I thought it was awful. I was like, “What the what is this mess?” It was just a whole bunch of action. And it I don’t know. I mean, everybody made the obvious connection. If you’ve seen the Supergirl trailer, you know it’s basically John Wick and the Guardians of the Galaxy basically, you know, because she’s got Krypto the dog and if you’ve seen the trailer, you know, the dog is in trouble. The bad guys hurt the dog and then she just goes on a revenge spree. It’s basically John Wick in space and it has a Guardians of the Galaxy feeling to it because she’s roaming around in a spaceship. It’s kind of like Firefly maybe because maybe I missed it. Maybe there’s like a western theme in some of the bars that she went to to have some Supergirl bar fights. But none of it made any sense to me. It was all just weird and forced and a lot of zooming around and fighting and punching and shooting and explosions and I like where’s the story? And I’m a big fan of good pop culture like you know the original Guardians of the Galaxy movie. Amazing. Loved it. It’s fun. So, I have no problem with big budget spectacle, but I mean, that movie had heart, had character, memorable characters, great dialogue, good story. It has all of that. But Supergirl, I was like, “What the heck?” So, Supergirl is not going to get me into the movie theater. I may end up watching it someday just so I can relate to other people talking about it. But most of these big budget spectacles that are made for the movie theater experience, they’re made with visuals in mind, not story. And the visuals are not as important to me as they are to other people. Having said all that, I do have a bit of a tradition going with a Planet Doug supporter, KY. Shout out to KY in KL. We’ve been going to see the new Dune movies and he sent me a message because there’s the new Dune is coming out. Dune. Is it Dune 3? And we’ve gone to see the Dune movies in the theater and so he was very excited that ah Dune 3. You and me we’re in the theater to go watch Dune 3. So that would get me into the theater just because I have this tradition going on with KY. But for myself, Dune 3 on the tablet, that’s good enough for me. Second question from Street Level Critic. What would your dream touring bike setup be? Yeah, that’s a tough question to answer in terms of specifics because I’m out of the loop. I haven’t kept up with what’s out there on the market and things have changed in a way. Things have changed so dramatically, I’m not even sure what’s going on anymore. What I mean is I came from the world of what I call bike touring. And bike touring involves a pretty standard set of gear. Four pannier bags, right? Two on the front wheel, two on the rear wheel, and a handlebar bag. And then you put your tent and sleeping bag. You strap them to the back of the rack. And that’s a touring setup. And that’s what I’ve done my whole life. I do like using trailers. And then with the trailer, you can dispense with a lot of the bags and you put all of your heavy gear in the trailer. So, it has pros and cons to using a trailer. I could live without the trailer. I can go both ways. But these days, when I see somebody on YouTube who has, you know, a YouTube channel about cycling, they do what I call bikepacking, which is minimalist, like super minimalist, where they don’t have four pannier bags anymore. They have a frame bag. So like in the triangle cutout of the bike, they put a frame bag in there and then they put smaller like very like huge sometimes huge handlebar bags like on the handlebars, but then they mount water bottles on the front forks. So the equipment they use is completely alien to my experience. I don’t even know how those bags work. Like these are YouTubers and they’re clearly shooting and editing video and my question is how where is your laptop? Like I’m looking at every one of those bags. None of them like maybe the frame bag. You could get like a MacBook Air in there or something, but their gear is so minimalist. I don’t know how they’re surviving. And how are they carrying enough water? Food. They’re camping. Like, I don’t get it. How in the world are they putting a tent and a sleeping bag and a sleeping pad and a pot and a pan and a fuel and stove and food and water and now you’re shooting video where your power banks and your memory cards and your chargers and your adapters and your laptop and on and on. I don’t know how they put all of that on the bike. Yeah, I don’t get it at all. So anyway, the modern world of traveling by bicycle has turned into something that I don’t even recognize and I don’t even know how they do it. There are still classic guys out there like there’s somebody like on the Let’s Go Cycling channel. He has the full gear. He has more than most people. And then he’s got the four pannier bags, but then he takes a couple of huge bags, like duffel bags, and then just piles them on the back rack. So, he’s carrying a lot of heavy gear, like way more than I would ever put on a bicycle. And of course, he suffers from broken spokes and flat tires a lot because of that. And I think he struggles a lot with the weight of the bicycle and all that gear. So that people like that do still exist out there. But anyway, circling back, what would my dream setup be? I need more space. So I can’t do bikepacking. I have to have the expedition style four pannier bags. That would be ideal. Ideally, I’d like to go without the trailer because the trailer does introduce some issues that I could do without. Advantages, but also issues. But I would like to have four pannier bags. Two on the front, two on the rear. Two regular pannier racks. Put my sleeping bag on the front, tent on the back, good to go. Water bottles on the frame in the middle. That’s fine. But then when it comes to the bike itself, how to set it up, I guess I’m pretty enamored of the new gear systems. Like I would love to try a Rohloff hub. I don’t know about Pinion. Pinion seems a little bit extreme to me. Maybe it’s the better option. But a Rohloff hub with a belt drive, that’s what I would like to try. And I think that would be my dream bike. There’s something out there. There’s a company called Koga. Last time I was looking around on the internet, I haven’t done this for a long time, but Koga put out some pretty nice sets of gear like a Koga World Traveller. That might be what they call their bike. And it would have all of that Rohloff hub generator built into the front hub maybe that recharges your gear for you like USB-C ports and handlebars would have the big butterfly bag the butterfly shape with all of your hand positions. So that that’s what I would like something like a dedicated modern touring bike with a Rohloff hub belt drive system. But still heavy-duty touring racks with a full set of pannier bags and handlebars designed for touring with all the hand positions. Yeah, that would be my dream bike. Almost forgot. Third question. Would you ever consider visiting Brazil? Yeah, absolutely. I mean though Brazil I think of Brazil a little bit like India. It’s so big. It’s a big place. And how do you think about Brazil when you go there? Where are you going to go? I think it would be a tough country to visit as a cyclist. And of course, you do hear a lot of warnings about Brazil, crime, theft, things like that. I don’t know. I don’t pay a lot of attention to that sort of stuff cuz most of it has no basis in reality I find. But you know, who knows? Brazil maybe might be a more tricky place to visit as a backpacker in terms of security, securing your possessions, especially if you’re cycling. I don’t know if Brazil is firmly on like the backpacker trail, so it might be a challenging country to visit. And Portuguese for whatever reason just bounces off my head. So speaking to people in Brazil, I think would be very hard. I don’t think there’s a lot of English there. And trying to communicate in Portuguese, I don’t think I could do it. Spanish, I mean, I love Spanish. I can handle Spanish. I could communicate in Spanish once I get up to speed. But Portuguese when I hear people speaking it, it’s just it does not penetrate at all. And I think I would struggle a lot with the language there. And I’m not familiar with Brazil at all. So, yeah, but yeah, I would consider it if, as I talked about earlier, if Planet Doug became more entertaining, producing more of an income and from today onward, I could just continue traveling and dot dot dot around the world. Yeah, I would definitely put Brazil on that route. So, yeah, I would go to Brazil.

Question 21. I think I will be able to sort of skip past. My question is how much money you spend daily including hotels throughout your journey. And yeah, I kind of talked about this a lot already. And yeah, I don’t have any idea in terms of a daily budget. I don’t have a I spend this much per day and I try to stick with that. I’m just always looking for things that I can afford and the biggest expense like all the other expenses are almost irrelevant to be honest. When it comes to food, you don’t really have to even think about it that much in Southeast Asia unless you’re here as a foodie and you’re shooting food vlogger videos. So, you’re going to nice restaurants and looking for that. If you’re just surviving day to day on whatever is available in your neighborhood, the amount you spend per day is so minimal that anybody really is going to have that much money. I don’t think you need to factor it in too much into your budget. The real money goes to hotels. It’s always accommodation. And then of course traveling like if you’re buying a flight, a ticket, things like that to fly to another country, visas, those are the big budget items. And then when you’re a YouTuber, replacing your gear as it breaks down, cameras, microphones, memory cards, things like that, smartphones, those are the big budget items. Like daily expenses, food and drinks and things like that don’t really factor in as a percentage. It’s hotels, accommodation, airline tickets, things like that, visas, anything to do with that. That’s where things get expensive. Now,

another question I should be able to answer quickly. Question 22 from the Lighthouse Hunter. I noticed you will be entering Thailand soon. Which border point will it be this time? Well, as it turns out, no, I’m not entering Thailand soon. I changed my route. Sudden choice. Instead of going north, I decided to head south. And now I’ll be heading towards Thailand again, but heading up the east coast. And depending on the length of time left on my visa, how long it takes for me to do my journey, I may not be entering Thailand at all. But my original plan, and to be honest, one of the reasons that factored into my decision to change my plan is I was going to enter Thailand through these very small border crossings on the east. So if you go up to the town of Jeli, very near Jeli, like 20 kilometers away, there’s a border crossing into Thailand. That’s where I was going to go. That was my plan all along, but I never really thought it through that carefully. And I thought I could cycle up to Hatyai and then back down again. But then I started doing more research into it. And people started freaking me out saying that if you try to cross there, the Thai authorities may not let you in because that part of Thailand in the south does have a history and a reputation for some instability, a little bit of fighting going on there. And if they see a foreigner alone on a bicycle and they ask you, you know, where are you going? Oh, I’m going to ride my bicycle. And they’re no no you’re not. You know, we can’t take responsibility for you going through that area. It’s too remote by yourself and it’s too dangerous. And then there’s another border crossing over from the one near Jeli. That one seems to have a Thai city on the other side, like a little bit of accommodation and restaurants. And so that one is I switched from the one near Jeli to the other one. I think the town is called Jeli. Sounds funny to my ears right now. But anyway,

I just worried for a second that I didn’t turn on my microphone, but yeah, I seem to have audio. There’s another border crossing and that one is probably where I would have gone if I had enough time. But even from there, I was told going from there up to Hat Yai might be, you know, the authorities might not like that because you’re in a bit more remote part of Thailand. The more common border crossing, of course, is way off on the west from, you know, you go from Penang, Georgetown up there. That’s the biggest border crossing. That’s where you should go as a foreigner. But anyway, I’m not doing that anymore anyway.

Question 23 from BDW. And I have a feeling I might know this person from the time when I was living in Taiwan. I’m trying to make the connection between the YouTube handle and this person. It might be somebody that I know. When will you travel back to Taiwan for a visit and a bike ride? Yeah, could be in 3 months. You know, that could happen because we’ll see. It all comes down to this the next 90 days in Malaysia. I do this bike ride around Malaysia and then I’m hitting a, you know, I’m my own member of the crunch club. After 90 days, I’ll be hitting a crunch point of Planet Doug about what comes after that. I have to make some serious decisions about that. And I could end up deciding, yeah, that’s it’s time to do something different. Perhaps even look for work. And then I could imagine doing something like flying from Malaysia to Taiwan, stopping off in Taiwan, putting out some feelers. Well, you know, do I want to stay in Taiwan? Are there possibilities for finding work? And I could, if I bring my bicycle with me, I probably won’t, but I could. I could do some cycling in Taiwan while I’m feeling the place out. And then if I decide, oh yeah, actually I can make a living in Taiwan again, I could decide to take a job right away. Or with the security of knowing I can work there, maybe I would factor in now a flight back to Canada, touch base, do all kinds of stuff there, get ready for my life in Taiwan, and then fly back to Taiwan and start working again. Random, totally random possibility, but I really love Taiwan. I had such the especially my final years there. I learned how to really enjoy Taiwan and Taiwan is a great place. Taipei is an amazing city. I had such a good life there towards the end. My scooter life and I would continue YouTube by the way for anyone out there going ah we you know don’t you know don’t leave YouTube I won’t no matter what I end up doing Planet Doug YouTube is going to continue forever whatever I end up doing no matter where I go how my life changes I’m going to continue with this so if I do go to Taiwan look for work, travel a little bit, go back to Canada, go back to Taiwan, get a job, buy a scooter. That’s the first thing I would do in Taiwan cuz Taiwan is scooter life. And then just travel all over Taiwan by scooter. All of that would be captured on video in some form or another depending on yeah, what’s going on in my life. So yeah, Planet Doug and YouTube, assuming YouTube continues as a company and a video platform. It’s kind of a till death do us part kind of a relationship. So you’re not getting rid of me that easily. But yeah, so but the question, when will you travel back to Taiwan for a visit and bike ride? Well, could be could be soon, could be later on. I’m not entirely sure. But I do have such a fondness for Taiwan and particularly the Taiwan scooter combination. That’s key to living in Taiwan. You got to get that scooter. Even if you’re working and then the weekend comes, you know, you’re on that scooter blasting out of Taipei, going into the mountains, you’ve got a holiday coming up, you know, travel around the island. Yeah, Taiwan is a very interesting, surprising place. A lot more expensive than this part of the world, you know, Southeast Asia. So, you kind of have to have an income while you’re there. Everything is more expensive, pricier than out here. But if you’re working there, then yeah, things work out. Okay,

question 24. We’re almost at the end from Composed Mind. Great vlogging, Doug. Interesting second day at Kuala Pilah. Are you taking any supplements while going on this journey? I do hope you are because riding in this kind of heat is no joke. Please take extra care of yourself. Some bananas would be good for you. Thank you Composed Mind. And he’s referring to in Kuala Pilah I rode there on my bicycle and then even though I was feeling visa expiry pressure I found Kuala Pilah quite an interesting place. So, I decided to spend an extra day there at least and just sort of do a walking tour of the streets and I met an interesting man there who was who had spearheaded a restoration project for a local historical archway and he told me a lot of the history of that place. And I could, you know, Planet Doug style, I could have spent a week in Kuala Pilah and woken up every day excited and have a new place to go, especially if I had access to a scooter or something like that. But anyway, that’s the video he’s referring to, my second video from Kuala Pilah. And yeah, the question about supplements, sadly, perhaps no. I talked about this in answer to another question where I don’t generally think about food much if at all the whole balanced I guess I have this whether it’s true or not I end up thinking about the human race throughout millennia right like in modern times we have certain diets and ideas that oh you have to get so much of this so much of this the balanced diet approach and if you don’t have one portion of vegetable, one portion of fruit and this and your K12 and this and this and this and this, you’re going to die. But then I do like to think back to humans as a species going back thousands and tens and hundreds of thousands of years and even much closer to modern times where you have people who lived quite happily on a very simple diet. Like if you go into classic village life during agricultural periods and they basically had a very simple diet of like whatever meat and potatoes if you’re talking about the Netherlands or rice in lots of Asia, cassava in Africa and they seem to do just fine. Of course, yeah, I say that but of course their life expectancy was nothing like we have today. So maybe the modern diet does have benefits in terms of health, though that probably has more to do with health care than anything else. Anyway, I have this idea that if I’m just eating normally without thinking about it, I’m still covering the bases, right? That okay just in my normal day to day life whenever I go out into the world and get a meal I’m getting enough of everything that I need and that if my body is suffering from a lack of something somehow it will let me know anyway I have this feeling rightly or wrongly that just eating a normal modern diet is enough in terms of getting the proper nutrients vitamins, protein, starches, carbohydrates, things, whatever it is this body needs, I have this feeling like I don’t have to worry about it that much. I probably need someone to take care of me, you know. Looking back over my life, I can see a certain amount of chaos and lack of control and there could have been a lot more efficiency. So, I think I needed somebody over here saying like helping me out saying, “Oh, okay. You know, here’s a proper meal. You better get your vegetables. You better get your fruit.” In particular, I eat almost no fruit. I’m just not a fruit guy. I eat bananas, but even bananas, they tend to be of the fried variety. You know, pisang goreng. I cannot walk by pisang goreng in Indonesia without buying some. So I get a lot of bananas at least in my pisang goreng and I drink fruit juice. You juice up the fruit. I’ll be drinking juice, fruit juice every day all day long. But buying fruit and peeling it and cutting it and eating it and washing my hand. I just I just can’t do any of that. So I probably don’t eat enough fruit. I probably don’t get enough vitamins to be honest because a lot of my meals maybe don’t have as much vegetable content either, but I don’t know. I feel like I’m just stumbling along. Okay. And I don’t take supplements of any kind. Maybe I should, but at this point anyway, I yeah, I don’t.

Question 25 is a repeat again but it has a little bit of a twist that will add something new. So this is question 25 from Second Swing Golf. The final question. How much a month do you spend on everything? Does your total YouTube income cover this? Well, how much I spend per month? Again, I don’t know. Every month is a little bit different, but again, the food and stuff like that, it doesn’t really seem to matter that much. But you’re looking at in Malaysia, it’s hard to get away with less than $500 a month just on accommodation. I probably come in a little bit under that because I’m trying to get below the 60, 50, 40 ringgit per night limit, especially since they tack on the tourism tax and all the other taxes in Malaysia. In Sumatra, it’s significantly lower than that, probably half that because everything is so much cheaper there. And then depending on the month, whether you’re talking about needing to buy a ticket to fly to another country or go there by ferry or stuff like that, or you’re buying a new piece of gear, but yeah, I don’t have a monthly amount, but I mean, it’s way below $1,000 if that’s what you’re asking. I don’t have $1,000 a month to spend. So, you know, you’re looking at, you know, $500, I guess, $600 a month when you factor in everything. I don’t really know. I haven’t really done the math, but there are expenses in the background, like I said, where I pay for hosting, for a website, and for a photo archive, and all of that is surprisingly expensive. I wish I could get away get rid of that cost, to be honest. There’s got to be a cheaper way to do what I’m doing. But it can add up over the year. Yeah. So, that’s a vague sort of answer. The last part, does your total YouTube income cover this? No. Not even close to be honest. If you’re talking about just YouTube income like that I get from YouTube AdSense, it actually costs me money to run a YouTube channel. So the amount of money that I historically have gotten from YouTube, I spend more money to make the videos than I get from YouTube in return. That’s how it’s been from the very beginning. It costs me a lot more money to make the videos than I make from the videos on YouTube. And yeah, that’s unless you’re a really popular YouTuber and you can break into the higher echelons. Yeah, it’s it costs you money to run a YouTube channel, especially if you factor in the gear purchases, but not even the gear purchases because when you are editing video, you need time. So, and any YouTuber will tell you this. So, I go into somewhere like Kuala Pilah and I shoot a video of a walking tour around Kuala Pilah. That video will take an entire day from dawn till bedtime to edit. And I struggle. I would really struggle to edit that video in one day. So I have to pay for another a second hotel room, all the meals that day. So it’ll take me all the expenses of a full day just sitting here editing. That has to be factored in as well, right? And then you have to think about opportunity costs the whole day that I was sitting on a bed with my laptop just editing that video. I’m not out exploring. So my travel life is on hold because I had to spend the entire day editing the video from the day before. So there are also opportunity costs and there are even more costs because in order to edit the video and upload it, you have to stay in a hotel like this. You need electricity, you need Wi-Fi, things like that, right? And I’ve noticed with a bunch of YouTubers that I followed over the years when they start their channel, they might be like a low-budget backpacker kind of person, but as their YouTube channel becomes more popular if they’re like successful YouTubers, you noticed that their lifestyle increases. And it’s not because they’re making more money. It’s because they find that if they stay in a low-budget hostel or in a dorm room, well, they can’t edit videos anymore because they need reliable Wi-Fi in order to upload things like that. So, they end up staying in nicer and nicer hotels because if you stay in a really cheap hotel that costs next to nothing, well, you’re going to be there for 3 days waiting for your video to upload because their Wi-Fi is so slow. So you end up saying, “Well, I have to stay in a more expensive hotel so that I get better Wi-Fi, you know, and then your lifestyle will start to creep up more and more.” Yeah. And you think about someone like my friend Daniel who runs the American Hobo YouTube channel. I mean, he didn’t start his YouTube channel with the idea, I don’t think, of making money with it. I’m not sure if he had that thought at all as he talks about it in his videos. It was more of a way to record his life for his own memories in the future. So, he was in Vietnam, northern Vietnam, and then he bought a very cheap bicycle for $100. And he started the project of for one year, he’s going to ride his bicycle through Southeast Asia and post a YouTube video every day. And that was his self-imposed goal. That was his project. But before you know it, he discovered that his, you know, he had an audience. Actually, people were watching his videos and interacting with him. And as he says in his videos, he was kind of surprised and pleased. He’s like, whoa, people are actually coming with me on this journey now. So now he feels pressure to do it better. And before you know it, right, he starts spending money. So ask him how much his YouTube channel cost him because he’s, you know, he’s down in my level of YouTube where we’re not making money from YouTube. So all he’s doing is spending money to make YouTube videos. So he started off he bought a Pocket 3, a DJI Pocket 3 camera, and that’s like a $700 investment, $700. So, he bought one of those and then that camera started to fall apart because it was his only camera and it got caught in the rain a couple of times. So, then he invested in a DJI Action 6 with a macro lens and of course he’s buying memory cards. He’s buying power banks, solar charger. He’s getting like mounting apparatus for his bicycle, for his knapsack. Just spending money constantly. Every time he tries to make a better video or film something differently means he has to go out shopping, buy new gear. And then he found he couldn’t edit on his phone anymore. So, he needed to buy a new phone cuz he does all his editing. And he you have to buy kind of a flagship level phone to get the processing power to edit 4K video. So he bought a like a $1,000 Samsung S25 so that he could continue. So you know DJI Pocket 3, DJI Action 6, Samsung S25 right there that’s like $3,000 US and yeah on and on and on. He invested all of that money and then he works through the night, night after night in his tent. It just like hour after every day, cycling all day long, setting up his tent, being attacked by ants, you know, ants chewing through his tent to get at him, the rain pouring down. He’s eating cold soaked noodles where he just, you know, takes ramen noodles and adds water and garlic and shakes it and just lets it get soggy and that would be his meal for the day. And then he’s there in the tent in the dark, you know, editing video until 2 in the morning. And so, I mean, it’s a huge investment of money, time, energy, effort, thinking to run a kind of like a even a simple YouTube channel. And you basically pay you’re paying for the privilege of making videos unless you are, you know, better at it than the average and you know how to make money with it. And of course, I’ve seen a lot of YouTubers like very successful ones talking about this topic. And it seems like in the modern era, brand deals are like the only way to do it. That you build up your audience to a certain level where you can say, “Okay, I have this number of people watching my videos and then you sell something for another company. Now you’re doing brand deals where you’re including advertisements for products and that can actually that money will be you know the numbers I’ve seen from other YouTubers like 10 20 30 times more money from brand deals than from actual YouTube AdSense. It’s almost like when they list their the they break down their finances, the money they make from YouTube, they’re like, “Ah, that’s not even relevant.” Because if that if I was depending on that, I would be starving on the streets. I would be broke. I’ve been paying for making Planet Doug out of my savings from when I used to work in Taiwan. I mentioned quite early on, you know, I worked in Taiwan, saved up some money, like a sink full of money, and then I pulled the plug. You know, that has been paying for the Planet Doug YouTube channel the whole time, basically. And of course, I don’t want to gloss over the fact that I would not be able to do this without the gear that has been gifted to me by Planet Doug subscribers. So, pretty much everything I’m using right now, almost everything has been given to me by a generous Planet Doug subscriber. And so, I’m talking about the tablet, my laptop that I edit with, the smartphone that I use, my GoPro camera was a birthday present from a YouTube Planet Doug subscriber. Out of my own money, you know, I’ve purchased grips and memory cards. This Olympus camera that I’m shooting with was also a gift from a generous Planet Doug subscriber. So, those and recently someone sent me a package, Alex, thank you, Alex, sent me a package in Malaysia containing GoPro batteries and an SSD drive. And to be honest, at this point, without those GoPro batteries, Planet Doug would be done because my old batteries were just so puffed up that I can’t even put them in the camera anymore. So, yeah. Yeah. Anyway, that’s a little window into the finances of at least my type of YouTuber. And I suppose I’m not that business minded. I’m not very savvy when it comes to money. I never have been because I didn’t really grow up in that kind of environment.

All right, that brings us to the end of this Planet Doug Ask Me Anything video. And of course, I talked for a very long time, a ridiculously long time. I’m very aware of that, but it’s I enjoy it. I suppose this can tie in with what I was just talking about in the answer to that last question that yeah, I don’t make any money from YouTube. It actually costs me money to be Planet Doug. But there are intangible benefits and one of them is that I just love doing it. I love shooting video. I love fiddling with gear. I love having a project. I love editing. I mean, editing is a great deal of it’s enjoyable for me. And I also enjoy talking and telling stories. And of course, Planet Doug allows me to meet people, have new experiences, have motivation and inspiration for going out, learning new things, and doing things. So, those are all intangible benefits that come with being a YouTuber. And I don’t want to, you know, belittle those at all. And one of the things it gives me is the chance to talk. And I love talking. I love being on camera. I love telling stories as evidenced by the probably two and a half hours, maybe longer that I’ve been recording this AMA video. But anyway, you can spread out the video over many, many days if you wish, or just skip to the question that you’re interested in and ignore all the others. So, I hope you don’t mind that I recorded such a long long long video. It’s what we do here on Planet Doug. So, that is it. Shutting down. Thank you to everyone for submitting questions, 25 of them. I wasn’t expecting so many to be honest. So, thank you very much for submitting the questions. I hope you enjoyed the video and as always, I’ll see you in the next one.